All: if you're going to post in this thread, please make sure you're up-to-date on the site guidelines and that you're following them: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. That means erring on the side of following them, since they're easy to break unintentionally.
Quite a few accounts who have been here for many years have been breaking the guidelines rather shamefully in this thread. That's dismaying. If established users can't set a good example for others, what chance does this community have? If Hacker News is interesting enough to keep coming back to for years, you owe it to your fellow members not to contribute to destroying it.
Patio11 has some good coverage of Trudeau's handling of the trucker protest against the government's handling of COVID-19 [1].
Whatever you think of the truckers' position or protest tactics, any punishment for their actions ought to go through the laws and court system. Trudeau instead essentially told the banking system "You can't do business with those people, they're terrorists." Patio11's words of what happened next:
"The assistant deputy finance minister...said...'The intent was not to get at the families', and when a democratic government starts a sentence that way something deeply #*&$#ed up has happened."
I'm not on the pulse of Canadian politics, so I don't really know what sins or political circumstances have led Trudeau to this point, or if he has any redeeming qualities. Personally, I'm glad to see him gone.
And the court of law later determined that this was an abuse of power and unlawful. The fact that there is an existing law that can be abused does not negate the argument that abusing it is unlawful.
On April 25, 2022, Prime Minister Trudeau selected Rouleau to be the commissioner of the Public Order Emergency Commission inquiry into the invocation of the Emergencies Act, which had occurred in response to the 2022 Canada convoy protest.
That's the bigger picture problem with Canada (and nearly every place else). Our laws assume the government is the good guy, when they should be assuming the government is public enemy number one.
iirc the finding was that it was within the power of the province to handle the situation.
The thing is, the province wasn't using the powers it had to handle it. The situation was obviously an emergency. You can't just let a convoy of heavy vehicles occupy your national capital indefinitely and say "not a problem, the provincial govt could theoretically handle this"
I'm not sure the Quebec kidnappings would have met the threshold either. There's a strong argument to be made that the law around the emergencies act is a bad law.
The court's finding meant ANY emergency powers would have failed to meet the standard.
It may have been an emergency in the first days with the honking. That largely stopped after a week or so.
They switched to camping in front of the parliament with bouncy castles etc.
The bridge that was occupied in another province was cleared.
I'm really not under the impression that at the time they went in there was any emergency. It was ugly: Peaceful unarmed protesters in pedestrian zones with no trucks in sight were pushed back by squads with assault rifles and loud tear gas grenades. People with assault rifles stormed delivery vans.
The narrative at the time was that of a huge "far right" (what a surprise ...) conspiracy. No proof has ever emerged, it was just an abuse of power of the "left" who were at the peak of their power back then.
I see a lot of posts like this, and this is straight up disinformation. I'm not assuming it's willful, since disinformation breeds disinformation, but here's my account as someone who lives here and is glad Trudeau resigned.
The idea that it was a few days of honking then bouncy castles is nonsense. It was an extended occupation of the downtown of the capital. Endless trucks and other vehicles, many with their wheels removed, back-to-back fully blocking a large section of the downtown for weeks. Yes, honking – and loud truck air horns.
There really was chaos downtown, and not the hand-wringing "poop in the street in SF" type. And a lot of it did have right wing vibes. Examples: A well known café had its large window with a LGBTQ illustration smashed. There was while when emergency workers needed escort downtown because of racist abuse. (I was downtown, I heard and saw a ton myself.) Just incredibly dumb stuff: A soup kitchen was intimidated and raided.
And yes, it was financially supported by the "right", including a lot of American money.
Yes, there was a site with bouncy castles and kids playing, but that's obviously not a problem. There's protest in Ottawa all the time, and it's sometimes inconvenient, and that's life in the capital.
The last straw for me wasn't even the chaos in Ottawa, but the protest shutting down the Ambassador bridge in Windsor. That's really bad. Ontario's auto sector is huge, and the perceived reliability and predictability of the flow of intermediate goods across the border is everything to that sector. Interrupting it has an enormous immediate and ongoing economic impact. (I'm not sure where you get your information, but the bridge is also in Ontario.)
None of that is to say that the emergencies act was the right tool. My fairly uninformed impression is that there were tools short of the act that should have been used.
But it's frustrating seeing disinformation and revisioning like this stand. Please reconsider whatever news sources are providing you with this false information.
I really don't. I wasn't in support of vaccine mandates and passports, and agreed with some of the truckers demands because in a democracy the bar for protecting personal autonomy and freedom should be incredibly high.
But I also think it's not an unreasonable point to disagree on. There are cases where we curtail freedom for emergencies. That's just a fact. That doesn't mean believing in authoritarianism. And, especially early in the pandemic, there was a lot of uncertainty about how apocalyptic it was going to be.
Flip side, since the mass vaccination has been incredibly valuable, policies that undermine public trust in vaccination hurt us as a society down the line and the bar should be particularly high for them! It's often said the most valuable tool for epidemiology is public trust.
The whole thing was idiotic. There was already a public discussion about when the vaccine mandate for truck drivers was going to be removed. There was plenty of of ground for more useful discussion.
So, to answer your question:
> So you support abusive authoritarianism
Great question, but no I do not. I think the government overreacted (too coercively). The freedom convoy, however was a real problem that needed ending. If that sounds like abusive authoritarianism to you, I'd invite you to share your opinion about traffic signs, prohibitions against cannibalism, and publicly funded hospitals.
Why does everyone have to suffer at the hands of a few?
Overwhelmingly Canadian's wanted the vehicles removed - I recall no public empathy. If not, there would have been overwhelming public outcry and a follow up larger movement protest that would have called for no-confidence motion in that moment.
> flip the sides, i.e. you've a conservative government and a liberal protesting organization, and I'll wait to see your reaction.
You mean like what the pro-Palestinian folks did at UofT (not far from where I work) in 2024 and who lost a court case (2024 ONSC 3755)? I was fine it.
Was also fine with the 'Occupy Toronto' folks losing their court case: 2011 ONSC 6862.
And as it stands, I live in Toronto, Canada, which does have a conservative government in the province who is doing all sorts of stupid things:
What do either of the given examples given have to do with the Emergencies Act of freezing someone out of banking? Being kicked off university property is not the same thing as having your financial life frozen by the feds.
> You mean like what the pro-Palestinian folks did at UofT (not far from where I work) in 2024 and who lost a court case (2024 ONSC 3755)? I was fine it.
How many of the UofT protestors were de-banked? There's a vast difference between having tents removed from a public space, and being cut off from essential parts of modern life. You can't pay insurance with cash. You can't have a regular phone contract. You may not even be able to have home internet. Someone who is debanked effectively becomes a different caste of person, one who is prohibited from most institutions and services.
You're comparing apples to oranges by comparing the treatment of the trucker protests and the campus occupiers.
Yes, and I live in the same city as well, and I'll agree with you that both Conservatives and Liberals have made things worse for us at different levels of the government.
Do you mean debanking by the government, or for any reasons?
(Because banks will already algorithmically drop you as a customer without explanation or recourse, akin to how you can get your Google account algorithimically banned. TBH it would be more of an inconvenience to have my Google account banned than one of my bank accounts.)
> TBH it would be more of an inconvenience to have my Google account banned than one of my bank accounts.
Congratulations, you're in an extremely privileged segment of society. Most of those truckers would likely find it easier to relate to a little green Martian in a flying saucer than to you.
There is a backlash against COVID actions that is happening now, is because people are terrible at math and worse at assessing risk. The idea that COVID was not a valid emergency is pure historical revisionism with no base in fact or data.
Public opinion polls consistently showed widespread overestimation of personal COVID risk across the political spectrum, and the policy response of reaching for poorly studied therapies and NPIs reflected this.
Yup. Like orders and orders of magnitude off. People thought they’d have like a 10% of dying if they caught Covid when it was closer to 0.2% (and much less when you stratify by risk conditions).
Public health did absolutely nothing to calm the public. In fact they intentionally stoked the panic fires and caused people to absolutely lose their minds.
Your numbers can be true but it is also true that those “biggest lockdowns in human history” didn’t do anything to change those numbers, nor were they ethical or moral. Humans can’t stop a respiratory virus like that—it was wishful thinking at best and peak human arrogance at worst.
And even if they could probably do something significant, that doesn’t mean humans have the right to do so. Those lockdowns and mandates were incredibly destructive to our communities, our children, our elders, and ourselves. They violated our inalienable human rights. They transferred immense wealth from the poor to the rich. And they didn’t do a single fucking thing but take a bad problem and make it exponentially worse.
What was the upshot/benefit of this "reduced transmission" which was purchased at enormous cost? Everyone eventually got COVID anyway. How many deaths were actually prevented rather than delayed?
There will be no answer to that. These experts played fast and loose with the data and honestly I don’t trust any of it.
And honestly the Science and Data really doesn’t matter. It was unethical and immoral to boot. Even if it had legitimate science and data backing it doesn't mean it was the right thing to do.
People try to drag us into the weeds with their “studies” and “papers” and links to half-assed broken data sources to derail us… the more powerful argument is from ethics and morals. And from plain old common sense, really.
I don’t even think they are being intentional. As I said elsewhere people went feral and shut off the critical thinking and intellectual curiosity parts of their brain. They’ll latch onto any scary data or paper that attempts to validate / rationalize their crazy behavior. It’s just basic human stuff.
By the time most people in Canada got COVID, they were already vaccinated. That was the whole point of limiting transmission. The let it rippers were saying that the old people should just stay in their retirement homes, not understanding that most people at high risk live with others who are working or are working themselves.
There are literally billions of other problems in society beyond “reducing covid transmission”. Lockdowns forced a myopic focus on exactly one problem to the exclusion of virtually all other problems.
Why was “reducing transmission” so much more important than providing children a sanctuary from abusers at home by way of open schools? Why was “reducing transmission” a greater problem to solve for than “elderly dying alone in an assisted living facility”.
Your study is a perfect example of the extremely myopic focus on COVID. It was as if absolutely nothing else was allowed to be a priority.
Also I’m curious, if this paper is true why did Florida or Sweden not have dead bodies lining the streets? They either ended their lockdowns earlier than most or didn’t have them at all? Did Florida feed them all to the gators? Was there a hidden “mass death” in Sweden I wasn’t aware of?
Or perhaps is “reduced transmission” not a good metric?
I ran my personal risk profile through qcovid.org and it spat out a 1 in 80,000 chance of death and 1 in 3,000 chance of hospitalization. Any notion of taking a rush-to-market vaccine went out the window at that point. And before someone says "well what about your obligations to others?", my obligation was to my kids, to stay healthy and able to earn a living.
Big numbers always sound big until they get put into context. All of the media and fearmongering public health “experts” loved to drop big numbers devoid of any context.
Right? Like these people forgot their own mortality or something.
I swear it was like something took a stick blender to people’s head and spun it around a bit. Some of the smartest people I knew absolutely lost their mind. They turned into feral animals, and I mean that in a very literal sense.
…and the worst part is they were encouraged to act that way by The Experts. Good news is as verboten. Only bad news was allowed.
> I swear it was like something took a stick blender to people’s head and spun it around a bit.
This is exactly what happened. Case counter chyrons on TV news, the Google tools where you could look it up for your own region, the videos of people collapsing in the street that were broadcast on social media platforms by government accounts -- it was all calculated to inculcate hysterical fear of the virus in order to jumpstart agendas that it enabled.
Honestly I think it was a massive, classic engineering disaster. It was multiple failures happening all at once that lead to the disaster that was humans response to Covid.
Everybody played to their incentives and this was the outcome. There was nothing done and no process or source of trust that could calm the masses and inject some kind of counter “antidote” to the hysteria. It ran unchecked.
Blocking traffic is still blocking traffic, though. In Canada, the "notwithstanding clause" essentially means no rights are absolute. Intentionally blocking traffic on highways here is generally illegal, insofar as people have a lawful right to drive there normally; see e.g. https://mtplaw.com/legal-news/arrests-for-blocking-a-highway... - and generally there will be clear evidence that such blockages are intentional.
A good parallel is the U.S. campus protests in opposition to military aid for Israel's Gaza campaign, which were violently dispersed. You can find lots of instances of mostly right wingers saying they should never be able to get a job again and such.
That was Bill Ackman. There were also right wingers like Candace Owens who took a stand against it. It’s inaccurate to say that every person on the right was agreeing with that statement.
I think it’s worth noting that the weekend before this, local residents of Ottawa had basically “stormed” one of the trucker convoy camps to unblock a road. There were genuine concerns that the residents of Ottawa were ready to take matters into their own hands, and it would be a bloodbath. Not to mention the blockade in Alberta where they were found with guns and a pipe bomb, with their communications indicating they were planning to murder the RCMP officers on site!
Declaring the Emergency acts was overwhelmingly popular in Canada and remains one of the most popular things Trudeau ever did. The moves to restrict access to banking affected less than 20 people (and I think they were generally funnelling money from international propaganda groups or committing similar financial crimes).
I was a resident of downtown Ottawa during this period. It was bad. We had a young kid and didn't feel even safe walking her to a park, because the route crossed over convoy lines and there were all sorts of stories of harassment and assaults. We didn't even experience the worst of it; lots of people dealt with truck horns blaring 24/7, but at least our street at least was kept clear as an emergency route.
We put up with the occupation for about two weeks, but we saw a steady escalation and decided to leave town. We stayed with family for two weeks until the convoy was cleared.
I'm very proud of the residents who were brave enough to put up a resistance (the so-called "Battle of Billings Bridge"), and I'm appalled by the response by the local police and the province. I absolutely believe the federal government made the correct choice, and this was proven out in the public hearing after the fact on the use of the Emergency Act.
Its interesting how as of late the working-class's totally self-sabatoging ways of protesting almost universally piss off their fellow men and women, rather than taking their grievances to the powers that support them.
There's been massive popular protests in France, Germany and Great Britain in the past few years. Maybe in more countries? But they don't always get media coverage. One that you should have heard of is the yellow vest protests in France.
Im French, my anecdotal opinion is the same as the Canadian parent comment: they block and destroy, propose nothing realistic and end up pissing everyone off. I vote Macron as a result.
Aren't that the only forms of protest that are allowed?
If I remember properly, offering the service for free (for instance in public transport) bear the risk of being held personally responsible of any damage or accident that would happen to anyone (which is not unlikely if you factor in provocations)
These are just the things that were recorded, reported on, and archived with the links functioning three years later. Scroll up and you can read about what many of us saw in person. And yes, there's more where that came from. But it's much better to read from people who live in Ottawa and want to share their experiences: https://www.opc-cpo.ca/
Thanks for the list! I can say that three of the stories I was referring to above are the ones listed as "Attacking a shop employee for masking up on their way to work", "Smashing windows of a business with a Pride flag" and "Trying to handcuff shut the doors of an apartment building".
The first and second happened only a couple blocks away from us, and we frequented both businesses, so it was infuriating to see them and their employers attacked like that. We lived in an apartment building so the third one was pretty alarming.
Not sure which town got the prominent coverage, but here in America a lot of the coverage we saw looked like a peaceful presence, organized to allow emergency passage, and frequently we saw what looked like a fair - lots of families strolling through, eating food, adults and kids dancing, buying random things from vendors. We saw interviews with drivers who told their stories and said they were there to peacefully protest, as was their right. It’s one of the reasons, I think, that the actions by Trudeau seemed so disproportionate.
A lot of the family-friendly stuff was specifically for the cameras. A few things I can speak to:
* It definitely wasn't peaceful -- activists and Ottawa residents documented numerous incidents of violence, harassment, threats, vandalism, and so on in Ottawa. This document compiles some of it: https://docs.google.com/document/d/13-Zg8yjEPYyybbLy70njbWxG...
* Organizers encouraged participants to bring more children when it became clear police action was imminent, presumably to complicate law enforcement efforts. A Facebook post even suggested adding bouncy castles to "contribute to the fun" during these escalations. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/02/17/freedom-conv...
I live in Ottawa. We were failed by all levels of government, our police services, and our intelligence services.
The convoy drove across the country, broadcasting their intentions on social media. Yet, everyone acted shocked when they did exactly what they said they were going to do.
I hesitate to call them protesters because I don't think they had a permit or a cohesive message beside F* Trudeau, but they were completely disrespectful to other citizens, and I could never defend their actions. However, irrespective of how unpopular their actions were, the courts have deemed the federal government's response unreasonable and unconstitutional, and I agree with that assessment.
The government could have dealt with this earlier and more directly, but whatever passes for "leadership" these days in Canada has proven itself completely inept.
Personally, I would like to see an inquiry into foreign interference in our elections, but I guess that’s not considered a pressing issue anymore.
> I hesitate to call them protesters because I don't think they had a permit
The notion that the common people need permission to protest is exactly why we are slowly, but surely arriving at oligarchies. The French are right. You don't need permission to show the ruling class who's king.
Perhaps bad phrasing, it is an emotional issue having lived through it.
I like to think that I don't live in a country ruled by a King but rather in a community of citizens who have collectively agreed on a way of doing things. This includes the right to express dissent against other citizens to whom we have delegated certain decision-making responsibilities. A permit isn't about seeking permission; it's about ensuring an orderly process so that things don't devolve into chaos and bouncy castles.
At the time, I think we were also in stage 2 lockdown(which should have been enough to stop it), so the people bearing the brunt of these actions, whatever you want to label it as, were not the ones making those decisions. Our elected officials don't live inside Parliament Hill.
In Canada, we have the inherent right to assemble as granted by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms; therefore, I don’t need permission, which is discretionary.
Permits in this context represent authorization that establishes procedures for exercising this right on property administered by government, which ensure things like public safety without infringing on any rights or freedoms of the protestors or other citizens.
>In Canada, we have the inherent right to assemble as granted by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms;
Playing devil's advocate here: what if it wasn't mentioned in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms? What if the CRF didn't exist to start with?
(my point being that when things are very bad, certain things need to be done regardless of what a formal law states, you cannot let tyranny call the shots)
> I like to think that I don't live in a country ruled by a King but rather in a community of citizens who have collectively agreed on a way of doing things
That is what a protest is. The collective agrees, not their rulers.
> A permit isn't about seeking permission; it's about ensuring an orderly process so that things don't devolve into chaos and bouncy castles.
I don't agree here, and even if that were so, there's a stark difference between the original intention and the ultimate use of permission as a tool.
I don't agree with your last point. In a democracy, we have elections at a cadence. If you disagree with protest permits, you are welcome to stand up in the next election, or vote for a representative who will.
We can elections yearly or monthly but man .. how unproductive that would be. The lowered cost of tech may indeed improve participatory democracy.
I see the system working in all of this btw. I support Trudeau but am okay if the liberals get voted out.
The monarch of Canada is the King of Canada. It's a completely separate role from the King of the UK even though it's the same person. Canada isn't ruled by the British King.
You don't need a permit to protest in Ottawa, on foot, unamplified in a location where you do not block others. You do need a permit to block the streets with your protest. Those are readily and regularly granted -- if the city didn't grant them the courts will force them to. Once you get that permit, you'll get a police escort to block the street for you.
I took part in one political protest in my life. The leaders spent most of their efforts screaming at us “stay out of the road and don’t block the sidewalk!”
We were encouraged to bring our kids, and criticized by the opposition for doing so. Our kids had a great time and learned the value political participation.
The protest was 100% successful at it achieving its one, narrow aim.
>I hesitate to call them protesters because I don't think they had a permit or a cohesive message beside F* Trudeau
I would assert that so-called "votes of no-confidence" in politicians are legitimate protest, even if they do not criticize any specific policy or behavior. It would be a strange world to live in where protests could or would be shut down and everyone would taunt the protesters with "but you didn't have a cohesive message except Stalin is bad".
There is a giant chasm between "F* Trudeau" and "Stalin is bad".
Some people would like you to believe it's close, and they would be wrong. Stalin murdered/tortured people en masse. Trudeau oversaw a government (democratically elected mine you) through a once in a century pandemic.
The convoy of protesters made a point, was allow to make it for sufficient period of time, and was told to go away when a majority of Canadians didn't agree with their stance.
When faced with reality of their unpopular nature and their inability to build a momentum or consensus. They dug in.
At some point, enough is enough. The Pandemic ended, public heath was restore, and none of what the protesters did mattered. None of the protesters continue to be persecuted by the Government of Canada, Ontario, or the City.
>There is a giant chasm between "F* Trudeau" and "Stalin is bad".
There might well be a giant chasm between Trudeau and Stalin, that's a matter of proper objective measurement which I don't think is easy and certainly has never been done. There is no chasm whatsoever between "fuck Trudeau" and "Stalin is bad". Not even much semantically. In choosing one politician/bureaucrat/whatever over another, I do not agree that anyone ever need justify their choices. Someone saying "I've stopped supporting this politician" whether don't politely or rudely, is valid. Protesting need not have any more message than this.
If protesting did require something more sophisticated than the assertion that one no longer supports them, then the weaseliest politicians and other charlatans could abuse that requirement (in fact, they already try to do so, and apologists make that easier for them to attempt it).
>and was told to go away when a majority of Canadians didn't agree with their stance.
It's unclear that a majority disagreed. It's unclear to me that there remains a majority at all in Canada.
>When faced with reality of their unpopular nature and their inability to build a momentum or consensus. They dug in.
Again, I'm not sure that's reality. If they could be deluded into thinking there were more of them than there were, what makes you immune to the reverse?
>and none of what the protesters did mattered.
We at least agree that it didn't matter in the ways that they hoped. But it mattered otherwise, when we saw the Canadian government use unjustifiable tactics to punish them even before they had been convicted of any crimes.
>None of the protesters continue to be persecuted
Well gee. When you put it like that, that "none *continue* to be persecuted" the complaints do sound kind of silly.
I don’t know why they couldn’t do the friggen obvious move of asking the police to unblock the roads by force, and impounding the vehicles for repeat offences. Going after bank accounts was a coward move that never made sense. If I just sat down in the middle of a subway tunnel, I would be removed by force immediately, no matter what I was protesting. They created problems for themselves by not doing the obvious solution.
Blocking a road is a fire hazard and should never have been tolerated by local police for that reason alone. You cannot impede transit in a city.
If only more people A) asked this question and B) looked into what was (not) happening.
Basically Ottawa police were insubordinate, sided with the truckers/occupiers/protesters, etc. The populist conservative provincial government completely failed to act, likely due to the protestors being on "their side".
> Ottawa was not being policed. Ticketing didn’t start for days. Tow-truck companies hesitated to move illegally parked trucks for fear of losing business from truckers after the protests ended. Protesters were refilling their trucks with jerry cans of diesel. When the police were ordered to put a stop to that, protesters began to carry empty jerry cans en masse to overwhelm law enforcement, but they needn’t have bothered: front-line officers were not following orders to stop them from gassing up. There were reports that sympathetic officers were sharing police intelligence with protesters. Anything the police did could backfire. Families with children were living in some of the trucks, and there were reports of firearms in others.
There is room for two failures. The province should have enforced the provincial law, and the feds should not have have taken action through the banking sector.
My preference would be that the fed enforce the laws on the books themselves (if they have the power to do so), or pressure the province to do so (using the democratic leverage available).
There’s no federal police, the government can make their resources available but it’s up to the province to use them or not. And sure, you could use funding, but there’s no guarantee that that would have solved the problem. The province could have kept digging their heels in.
I don't know exactly how Federalism works in Canada but the answer is their jobs. If that doesn't entail stepping in to provincial business, they shouldn't do anything.
Trudeau was the one who triggered the protests in the first place.
The liberal, moral, fast and peaceful solution to the trucker protests was simple: stop forcing people to take experimental drugs against their will. The vaccines didn't reduce transmission, and there is no rule against living life in a risky way (even if you believe the vaccines worked at all), so there was never any moral argument for the mandates. The truckers were right to protest, as Trudeau and the Canadian people were doing them a severe injustice.
Every single vaccine or gathering mandate I experienced was either provincial (Conservatives) or municipal (also conservative for Toronto and georgetown where I live).that they barked up the completely wrong tree is the breathtakingly depressing stupidity behind the whole thing.
Don't believe me? Alberta Conservatives did not have same policies. Then they begged BC and Saskatchewan for ICU beds but that's besides the point - provinces and municipalities had freedom to enact different policies.
Also in Ontario. I am still very confused how none of this seems to have affected Doug Ford. This was the most mandated, school-closed, shut-things-down jurisdiction in North America at the time. And somehow Trudeau is apparently to blame for it all, and Ford is still... electable?
Meanwhile the feds only had jurisdiction over borders and airports. They acquired the vaccines, but it was the provinces that doled them out and set the policies for what would require them.
At the height of covid Ford even had outdoor ski hills shut down. Crazy times. Some of it made sense, some of it didn't. But I can tell you my neighbours with F Trudeau stickers were very angry about the vaccines, but still somehow are voting for Ford. Confusing.
Provincial governments were a mistake - the average Canadian fundamentally misunderstands the division of powers and responsibilities between federal and provincial governments, and this is remarkably useful for bad actors.
I personally think Chrétien was a terrible offender, since his balanced budgets in the 90’s were a result of pushing responsibilities on the provinces. The current wave of conservative provincial governments have similarly created their own problems (particularly with the international student explosion) while placing all of the blame of the federal government.
Harris/Klein + Chretien was a deadly combination, and more intimately connected than people will admit. Supposed ideological opponents, but the latter created the conditions for the former to thrive.
It was something like the Ottawa police said they were unable to and Ford said it was a local issue or not a priority. He was onboard with emergency act as it helped with Windsor too.
This was also voted on in Parliament too, 185 to 151
Thing is, the federal government does not have the power to "ask the police" to do anything. That's obviously by design and part of the demarcation of powers we expect from a democracy. The accusations of authoritarianism would have been just as drastic (I think?) if the PM had stood up and tried to call the RCMP or Ottawa police / OPP to task for their inaction and so on.
Sibling commenter is right: the police should be the ones under the microscope, for failing the citizenry. Questions should be asked about to what degree their membership was compromised by allegiance to or involvement with the convoy and its cause.
But that's not what I was arguing? Holding accountable is not the same as telling them what to do in terms of enforcement action.
This was actually discussed as a specific controversy at the time the convoy was undergoing. Trudeau getting on the phone with chief of police and asking him to clear the protest would be a serious breach of political standards in our democracy.
Also the police in question here are the Ottawa Police Service, not the RCMP, I believe.
Your phrasing is "do not have the power". Trudeau most certainly does have the power.
And I'd disagree about breeching political standards. The police are an executive function and report to the PM. I'd like to think Canadians know that.
The RCMP, reports of the Country of Canada (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Canadian_Mounted_Police). And the RCMP is "a police service for the whole of Canada to be used in the enforcement of the laws of the Dominion, but at the same time available for the enforcement of law generally in such provinces as may desire to employ its services."
The most important part is the RCMP enforcement in provinces is at the DESIRE of the provinces, in this case The Ontario Provincial Government.
If I'm reading this thread correctly, it sounds like truckers staged a protest in Canada blockading roads. The government couldn't move the trucks because the cops sympathized with the protestors. So the government debanked the truckers as well as anyone caught donating more than $20 to them. Damn.
It takes half a day to get the details over with a judge and decide exactly whose and what accounts to lock, those truckers were allowed to stay there for months. (And if you don't know what exactly to block, you shouldn't be allowed to block anything. Maybe you still have enough reason to look at their movement, maybe not.)
Also, it takes a couple of hours to get the police to unblock a road. Last time I checked, money movement in bank accounts does not block roads.
So the threat of violence against a non violent protest resulted in the non violent protestors being labeled terrorist and justified all the action that followed?
A quick search shows 120dB at 1m isn't abnormal for a truck air horn. A line of them from far enough away will decrease in level by 3dB per doubling of distance. 8 doublings would make it ~96dB at 256m.
It's definitely not 'overwhelmingly popular,' but polling shows majority support (66%) from Canadians for use of the Emergencies Act at the time of the protest.
Upon digging, Wikipedia most prominently cites secondary sources here. The first of which is linked to a group called "Maru Group", whose website is dysfunctional. They are owned by Stagwell Marketing, whose CEO, Mark Penn, is directly linked to the US and Canadian Government, and more specifically to companies which were directly hurt by the trucking protest. Maru Group's sampling is tiny, they asked only 1500 people and they give no information on how they gathered this data.
Better polls have the numbers of people supporting this measure somewhere around 50%.
For anything even remotely controversial, I stick exclusively with primary sources and ignore Wikipedia. The site is clearly compromised by admins who only want left-leaning secondary sources summarized. If you come across a controversial topic with biased, or even faulty information, the admins will remove edits which don’t comply with their bias, ban persistent users, and eventually “protect” the article. Even one of the co-founders has railed against the current state of the site.
It really should. I'm a PhD student (which does not overly qualify me anyway) but the more I look into works with quantitative measuring methods, the more I have a hard time trusting polls and statistics in general. Even in academic papers, or at least the ones I reviewed, more often than not the data is massaged in some way and leaves a lot to be desired.
It's best to immediately get suspicious if a polling company is owned by some parent firm with a clear conflict of interest.
That's really great work, thanks -- could you share a link to the 50% polls? This is probably worth porting back to the Wikipedia page to set the record straight.
They are also in the Wikipedia article, just further down. But what is really interesting is that the 66% source is dominantly cited in almost every single press article on the matter.
You're mistaking citing secondary sources for being a secondary source. In this context, Wikipedia would be a tertiary source. Yes, I get that this is their mission statement, but I find that when citing secondary sources as truth, you have to be even more careful.
A better way for this article would be "newsletter XY reported on a poll that said ABC", instead of pointing to the poll but linking to the newsletter.
>You're mistaking citing secondary sources for being a secondary source.
No, I'm not. I cited a document titled "Wikipedia is a tertiary source" in order to establish that prominently citing secondary sources (which is what makes Wikipedia a tertiary source) is established Wikipedia policy (as described in the document).
Yes, it's stated there that tertiary sources can in principle cite primary sources directly. But in practice, if you try this, you'll be accused of violating Wikipedia policy: in particular, primary sources for anything vaguely political will not be considered reliable (even though the dependence on secondary sources from the approved list is a major source of bias) and if you can't find an acceptable secondary source then other editors will conclude that the material is not notable.
> A better way for this article would be "newsletter XY reported on a poll that said ABC", instead of pointing to the poll but linking to the newsletter.
I agree; but as far as Wikipedians seem to be concerned, if newsletter XY is on the approved RS list, things that it says happened must have actually happened (and you'll only be allowed to challenge that with another source from the approved RS list; they'll say you're doing "original research" by pointing out directly that the poll doesn't actually say ABC, because that's, like, just your analysis of the poll).
Wikipedia is not concerned with truth, in that being able to disprove content in supposedly reliable sources doesn't entitle you to correct the material.
I don't know, but I live in the NCR, and few I know thought it was right.
The real issue was the Ottawa police. The RCMP and OPP were willing to help, and use legal means to clear the blockade. The Ottawa Police dropped the ball, didn't organize, and just made a mess.
I'm sure people directly affected agree with you, but it's been downhill for this regime since the trucker protest. We are literally still talking about it, right now.
I cannot comprehend how it could be overwhelmingly supported.
> An Economist/YouGov poll conducted from February 12 to 15 found that 80% of Americans had heard of the convoy protests. [...] Among Republicans, 71 per cent supported the convoy protests, compared to 18 per cent of Democrats. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada_convoy_protest#Opinion_...)
When you consider how much attention the convoy got in America, and how sympathies fell on such partisan grounds, it gets more concerning. Suddenly, Canadian politics is a hunting ground for the likes of Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, online bot mobs... I think you see where I’m going.
It’s difficult to approach these discussions and not feel like bad-faith actors are artificially making a bugbear out of it. This is especially true when many of the loudest defenders of the convoy weren’t even there, aren't even Canadian, and -- three years later -- may not even be people.
That said, I can agree the Emergencies Act probably shouldn't have been used here, and I have question marks about freezing people's bank accounts -- but this is really a conversation actual Canadians should be owning, since it concerns us most directly.
As a Canadian I haven't heard about the trucker protest since they happened. It was bizarre seeing it come up as the top discussion point in this thread and seems like a big mismatch between American and Canadian perception of what's going on.
It's absolutely astounding that there have not been harsher consequences for the police who abandoned their duty in Ottawa. Where is the of rule of law here?
Investigations and penalties for everyone up the chain, starting with the frontline officers who were on the ground refusing to issue tickets. If an officer chooses to not do their job over their political beliefs they do not belong on the force.
“If you owe the bank $100, that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem.”
Same applies here. If 10 officers misbehave, it is easy to fire them all, as you suggest.
If a majority of the entire police force defects, your only choice is between limiting the scope of the punishment to a few ringleaders vs. basically disbanding the police force and starting a new one from scratch, hoping that you can even recruit enough people to do so; but, in the meantime, the city won't be policed anymore, as the entire institutional memory has been purged.
In most similar cases in history, the authorities opted for a blanket pardon, as it is much less of a headache.
It is not even a new problem. Police is a relatively recent institution, but armies, gendarmes, legions etc. rebelled all the time, and peace usually had to be bought by concessions.
It's not unheard of to disband and reconstitute a police department. I would argue its the right move when the organization as a whole has effectively gone rogue.
The most significant example I'm aware of is Camden New Jersey.
The city’s crime rate was among the worst in the US. Within nine square miles and among nearly 75,000 residents, there were over 170 open-air drug markets reported in 2013, county officials told CNN. Violent crime abounded. Police corruption was at the core.
Lawsuits filed against the department uncovered that officers routinely planted evidence on suspects, fabricated reports and committed perjury. After the corruption was exposed, courts overturned the convictions of 88 people, the ACLU reported in 2013.
So in 2012, officials voted to completely disband the department – it was beyond reform.
And in 2013, the Camden County Police Department officially began its tenure. No other city of Camden’s size has done anything quite like it.
Absolutely. I'm a paramedic. I will be in front of a licensing hearing defending why should be allowed to continue as a paramedic to the DOH if I refuse to treat a patient because of politics/beliefs, as an EMS provider.
Depending on the severity, I can even be facing administrative charges of patient abandonment under my state's Administrative Code for standards of care for providers.
Crazy how only Canada has used emergency powers to curtail opposition. In fact it did that twice in 50 years.
And only twenty people getting their rights completely stripped because they bothered the federal government workers in Ottawa is good enough according to you?
Maybe it's just because I'm part of a minority but your entire comment is exactly the issue with Canadian politics. We basically have 0 rights the moment a majority decides that we don't. I guess that's the perks of having an incredibly ineffective constitution.
Please don't cross into the flamewar style on HN. This comment is only dipping a toe in that direction, but still—it's the opposite direction to what we're trying for here.
Are you talking about the militant separatists who had already committed mailbombings and escalated to assasinating a government official and kidnapping a foreign diplomat on Canadian soil in 1970?
It’s also important to note that afterwards Quebec separatism continued to be a legitimate political movement without a terrorist wing, with parties represented in federal and provincial governments.
The Patriot act doesn't even come close to emergency powers. And the Patriot act would've been insanely worse if the US had the equivalent of our non withstanding clause.
So no, it hasn't been doing the same. Bush and his cronies sure would've wanted to go further though, I agree.
Also, another difference is that the Patriot act has been very controversial in the years since. Whereas the same hasn't been true in Canada for the usage of emergency power. And no one seems to care that we see more and more laws passed with the non-withstanding clause either.
> Crazy how only Canada has used emergency powers to curtail opposition.
As opposed to using it to curtail support? It was used against occupiers and there is no Charter right to that (2011 ONSC 6862; 2024 ONSC 3755).
> We basically have 0 rights rights the moment a majority decides that we don't. I guess that's the perks of having an incredibly ineffective constitution.
There are multiple cases where governments (with majorities) have passed legislation that was successfully challenged under the Charter.
Further, the Emergencies Act was written post-Charter, with it in mind:
> AND WHEREAS the Governor in Council, in taking such special temporary measures, would be subject to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the Canadian Bill of Rights and must have regard to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, particularly with respect to those fundamental rights that are not to be limited or abridged even in a national emergency;
> * But I hope you realize that it doesn't show anything. A federal or even provincial government can absolutely pass any law, with a simple majority, that doesn't respect the charter simply by invoking the non withstanding clause.*
And the use of the withstanding clause has to be re-up every five years, as that is the maximum time before a new election is held so that The People™ can decide if they want to continue with it:
> (3) A declaration made under subsection (1) shall cease to have effect five years after it comes into force or on such earlier date as may be specified in the declaration.
> Can you show me a single piece of legislation that used that clause and that was still overturned?
The point of the clause was so that The People™, through their duly elected representatives, would have the final say in matters of government and not judges (who are potentially answerable to no one). Whether it should be judges that have the final say (like in the US) or legislators (like in the UK) is up for debate: in Canada it was decided to split the difference.
> But the point remains that the constitution is absolutely horrible for minorities.
Tell that to gay people who got to get married because of it—even though there is nothing about the topic in the Charter. This was before it was probably fully accepted socially, and I doubt any politician wanted to make the move.
See also perhaps abortion under the Morgentaler decision in the 1980s, when society was much more conservative.
You can probably say the same thing about euthanasia (which the SCC disallowed in 1993 (Rodriguez, [1993] 3 SCR 519) and then insisted upon more recently, which gave us the euphemistically named MAID).
Those are unrelated to the charter, and all of those have been allowed without using the non withstanding clause. As you said yourself, nothing in the charter says that gay people can't marry.
I genuinely can't think of a single time where the clause was used to add rights instead of removing them so I'm not sure what your argument is.
Almost everything you mentioned isn't really related to the constitution. In fact, any province could use the non withstanding clause tomorrow to make gay marriage illegal again, even if the SCC allowed it. So if anything,that shows how useless the charter is.
If your point is that the constitution allows for flexibility then sure yes, but that's more due to the "living constitution" framework that the SCC uses than the conditions itself.
All three cases were decided on Charter grounds. Morgentaler tried challenging abortion pre-Charter and lost.
> Almost everything you mentioned isn't really related to the constitution. In fact, any province could use the non withstanding clause tomorrow to make gay marriage illegal again, even if the SCC allowed it. So if anything,that shows how useless the charter is.
The Canadian Constitution and the rights there-in is not absolutist:
> 1 The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.
"In 1971, official date of the birth of topos theory, unfortunately the dream team at
Dalhousie was dispersed. What happened, that made you go to Denmark ?
Some members of the team, including myself, became active against the Vietnam
war and later against the War Measures Act proclaimed by Trudeau.
That Act,similar in many ways to the Patriot Act 35 years later in the US, suspended civil liberties under the pretext of a terrorist danger.
(The alleged danger at the time was a Quebec group later revealed to be infiltrated by the RCMP, the Canadian secret police.)
Twelve communist bookstores in Quebec (unrelated to the terrorists) were burned down by police;
several political activists from various groups
across Canada were incarcerated in mental hospitals, etc. etc.
I publicly opposed the consolidation of this fascist law, both in the university senate and in public demonstrations.
The administration of the university declared me guilty of “disruption of academic activities”.
Rumors began to be circulated, for example, that my categorical arrow diagrams were actually plans for attacking the administration building.
Amazingly there is someone living very close to the airport where they found the body of the Deputy Premier of Quebec (Pierre Laporte) in 1970 that flies the flags of allegiance to the successors of the terrorists (i.e. the MNLQ following from the FLQ) from a pole in his yard for everyone on the highway to see.
For some people all this stuff is very much part of their reason for being, but the FLQ took being obnoxious to make a point to staggering new levels. Just the titles of their books alone are astonishing, and impossible to quote here without causing justified offence.
yeah what people dont always understand (not saying you dont) is that FLQ supporters see themselves as basically being occupied by Anglo Canadians. Until the 60's there was entrenched discrimination in Montreal against catholics and french-speakers. The city even used to have two hockey teams, one for Anglos and one for Francos.
Ehh, I think a surprising amount of the Quebecois’ problems were self-inflicted by letting the Catholic Church run people’s lives, and the Quiet Revolution helped a lot. Like, it wasn’t the anglos bullying people’s grandmothers into having an eighth child after a rough pregnancy, the local priest would take a few minutes during mass to call her out in front of he whole community.
Your account has been breaking the site guidelines badly in this thread. Would you please stop? Regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are, It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
dang, it would help if you would clarify which guideline I'm violating.
I see a lot of deep flame bait in this thread. A lot of it by people of another country, making claims about my own for partisan and ideological purposes. Context here is important given news in recent weeks, with Trudeau's name on the lips of people like Trump, Musk, etc.
I have a "karma" of almost 20,000 and have been on hackernews for a very long time at this point. I'm sure my passion is showing through, but it feels odd given my citizenship and past here, to single me out.
There are some issues which trigger emotional response. I usually don't get into the back and forth response, but this is a seriously frustrating thread and I think if you're not ready for the level of passionate vitriol this topic (we have people driving around with bumper stickers reading "F* Trudeau" and this whole topic is tied in with COVID, vaccines, etc. etc.) will unleash, it's best to lock or flag this whole topic.
I'm sorry I couldn't respond to this sooner! I got started on a reply and then ended up on a flight with no wifi.
> it would help if you would clarify which guideline I'm violating
I know, and I wish I had the cycles to clarify this in every case; it's just not possible. If you look at the first paragraph of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42629499, I wrote a longer explanation about this for a different user who was asking the same thing (albeit rather less politely).
As a quick answer though, comments like these broke the site guidelines by using inflammatory rhetoric, cross-examination, calling names, snark, and crossing into personal attack:
Me too, so I spent hours moderating it and posted 20 or so requests to people to stop, as well as a general admonition at the top of the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42616355.
> A lot of it by people of another country, making claims about my own
Such perceptions aren't reliable. Internet readers tend to back-fit such perceptions to their assumptions about who would be holding a given position and why; but these assumptions are frequently contradicted by the data. Since the perceptions mostly add to one's feelings of aggravation, it's best to remember that one doesn't actually know these things (e.g. who is posting from where) and suspend them.
Unfortunately we can't publish the data without violating people's privacy, but many comments opposing your views were posted from Canadian IP addresses and many comments supporting your views were posting from IP addresses outside Canada. Not a perfect indicator, but it's clear that this argument breaks down on ideological lines, not national lines.
> it feels odd given my citizenship and past here, to single me out
You were in no way being singled out, and certainly not given your citizenship! If you look through my other posts in this thread (not that I recommend it), you'll see how many other admonishments I posted. We're as careful as we know how to be to moderate HN based on the site guidelines, not people's views, let alone their nationality, background, or anything like that.
There were tons of other users breaking the site guidelines in this thread, but it wasn't possible to get to them all. Unfortunately people tend to jump to the conclusion, when they see a bad post going unmoderated, that the mods must secretly agree with it. Nothing could be further from true; most likely we just didn't see it.
> There are some issues which trigger emotional response.
Indeed there are. The question then becomes how well we each can regulate our emotional responses. Commenters here are asked to do that regardless of how wrong others are or one feels they are. If you (<-- I don't mean you personally, of course, but all of us) can't do that without remaining respectful to others, it's best to wait until your activation has settled to the point when you can. That's not easy, of course, but it's doable. Your more recent comments in this thread, for example, have been fine.
> if you're not ready for the level of passionate vitriol this topic will unleash, it's best to lock or flag this whole topic
We do that much of the time but I don't believe it's either possible or desirable to do it all the time. For this community to fulfill its mandate, we need occasional cases of difficult and divisive topics getting frontpage discussion, and community members need to develop the maturity and self-regulation to be able to do it respectfully, remaining curious, even in the presence of others who are not doing that at all. Longstanding members have the most responsibility to do this.
It would be so much easier and less stressful not to take on that challenge, but then HN would be less than it might be, and it's our job to try to help it fulfill its potential.
Would you please stop perpetuating this flamewar? I asked you upthread not to go in that direction, and instead you've gone full bore in that direction. Not cool.
(I don't care what side of the argument people are on—I care who is breaking the site guidelines and making HN a more hellish place.)
Maybe it's because other countries are too soft (talking from the perspective of a French who saw suburbs in fire because some people did not want to stop when the police told them so).
I don't have a horse in this race, but I would have found it useful if you wrote what exactly you find terrifying. It's often in this kind of discussions that someone says "Things said here are X", but there are things said on both sides and I literally cannot tell even which side the speaker is on.
It’s also so very weird that both sides of this issue are likely nodding their head agreeing with you. I couldn’t get a good inference on which side of the comments you meant, personal opinion and assumptions notwithstanding.
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.” - CS Lewis.
Symbolic actions like painting "BLM" on a street are cute and all, but that doesn't mean they supported the protests. In fact, the cities such as New York and Chicago had some of the most violent suppression of protests by their police forces, despite loudly claiming to support BLM. Actions ultimately speak louder than words.
> At least 200 cities in the U.S. had imposed curfews by early June 2020, while more than 30 states and Washington, D.C., activated over 96,000 National Guard and State Guard service members.[33][34][35][36] The deployment constituted the largest military operation other than war in U.S. history.[37]
Yes, I know since I was part of the protests back then. But there's an incredibly big difference between cracking down on a protest and invoking emergency powers.
In America, we didn’t need emergency powers to shoot BLM protesters. Or Civil Rights protesters, or the unarmed veterans of the Bonus Army, or union members — historically it’s fine to shoot protesters.
Conservatives are just snowflakes because it happened to their guys just one time.
Okay, so if I show you an example of a protest with people that weren't masking or social distancing, you'd be in favor of using emergency powers against protestors that were protesting for racial justice?
What glib nonsense. We had authoritarian right wing protesters -- who don't believe in democracy -- trying to topple our elected government. Imposing their will on the people in Ottawa for weeks, threatening violence and disturbing the peace.
i.e. Not constitutionally responsible to the people.
Words have meaning, as do actions, sir, and you're choose to ignore both because of your partisan blind spots.
> There was no "peaceful" presentation of grievance. There was weeks of civil disobedience and actual acts of violence.
Partisans love to play this game, where they judge a large group of people by the worst possible interpretation of the actions of a tiny subset of them.
For a protest which some estimates say peaked at ~18,000, this was the resulting set of "violent" charges:
"12 charges of assaulting a peace officer; six charges of assault; three charges of assault or intimidation with a weapon; five charges of possessing a weapon dangerous to public peace; two charges of carrying a concealed weapon; one charge of possessing a restricted firearm; and four charges of uttering threats of death or bodily harm." [0]
Obviously this is not acceptable, but the idea that the protesters as a group were "authoritarians" because 0.01% of them got violent is hysterical nonsense.
Charges were low because the police refused to do their job. This is stated on record.
(Also... Partisan hardly describes me. I've never voted Liberal in my life and have been opposed to this PM since day one. Ask any of my annoyed coworkers and friends.)
But that's the point of having constitutional limitations on political power and how it is exercised. Unfortunately, it's all to common to hear arguments that the exercise of political power should have no limitations so long as it's approved of by a quantitative majority.
A sufficient majority can change the constitution though. It’s impossible to have a mechanism that prevents that. So this is merely a debate of 51% vs. 67% (or whatever).
The amendment process is slow and complex by design. It's not just a one-off supermajority, but rather a supermajority in both houses of Congress (or a special amending convention) followed by a supermajority of states each individually ratifying a proposed amendment. The most recent constitutional amendment took over 200 years to be ratified.
The nature of the process makes it very difficult to misuse constitutional amendments a mechanism for implementing policy to deal with ephemeral controversies or emotion-laden causes. The only time that really happened was with the 18th amendment, and that was a disaster, which ultimately was repealed.
My comment was about democracies and their constitutions in general. I’m neither Canadian nor American. Yes, there are significant degrees in how easy or hard it is, but in the end if you have a sufficiently large majority that wants to deprive a minority of their rights, the mere fact of having a democracy by itself doesn’t prevent it.
The amendment process has indeed become impractical in the US, and given that "nature abhors vacuum", a different and easier route to bending the constitutional law was found - nominate your people to SCOTUS and let the interpret the Constitution favorably to you.
I would argue that this is a very suboptimal solution to the problem.
I don't know of any western democracy that has something this blatant in their constitution, though I might be wrong:
>A simple majority vote in any of Canada's 14 jurisdictions may suspend the core rights of the Charter. However, the rights to be overridden must be either a "fundamental right" guaranteed by Section 2 (such as freedom of expression, religion, and association), a "legal right" guaranteed by Sections 7–14 (such as rights to liberty and freedom from search and seizures and cruel and unusual punishment) or a Section 15 "equality right".[2] Other rights such as section 6 mobility rights, democratic rights, and language rights are inviolable.
I don't think the US or France can just do a simple (parliamentary!) majority vote to override almost every right their citizens have. And this is not theoretical, the non withstanding clause is getting used more and more frequently here in Canada. And remember, since it's just a simple majority in parliament, it's only a matter of getting around 35% of the total votes. So a government that has 35% the popular vote can just suspend any right we have. Is that actually common?
> A simple majority vote in any of Canada's 14 jurisdictions may suspend the core rights of the Charter
This is misleading. It also has to be in their juridsiction.
For example, alberta (25 years ago) tried to use the notwthstanding clause to ban gay marriage. It didn't work because it was out of their juridsiction.
> So a government that has 35% the popular vote can just suspend any right we have.
The notwithstanding clause only applies to some parts of the charter not all of it. It also doesn't apply to rights from other parts of the constitution.
It might also be possible for the federal government to disallow particularly egregious rights violation by provinces. I think its still an open question if fed still has power of reservation or disallowance or not.
> I don't think the US or France can just do a simple (parliamentary!) majority vote to override almost every right their citizens have.
What about the WWII Japanese internment camps? That wasn’t even a legislative action, it was Executive order 9066. There’s also the Habeas Corpus Suspension Act during the civil war.
I agree it’s not as blatantly spelled out in the Constitution but the mechanisms exist.
America is specifically designed not to be this and to prevent a tyranny of the majority because original immigrants to the USA were from minority religions where they lived in Europe and had been terrorized plenty.
And that designed failed spectacularly from the beginning. As the post you're replying to points out, slavery is essentially the majority deciding that a minority and their descendants have no rights whatsoever. This state of affairs lasted until the 1860s and even then those rights for the minority were severely curtailed until at least the 1960s.
I wouldn't say it failed spectacularly. The trade-off was well known amongst many even at the founding of america. There would simply be no America if slavery was disallowed from the beginning.
A hospital could still be a net positive for society, even if sometimes people go there and die who otherwise would have lived if they did not go to the hospital.
Was there a majority that was pro-slavery? My understanding was the agreement was that it was a minority that wanted slavery, and that slavery would be kept to that minorities states?
The Puritans were a minority group among the original settlers to the US, among the Dutch, French, Spanish, other British settlers and others. The founders and architects of the Constitution and US government were not Puritans.
The guy likely to take over is going to use non-emergency powers to curtail the rights of trans people.
The sanctioned individuals were involved with blocking an international border. They had the stated intention of causing mischief and preventing leaving or entering Canada. They were blockading their own economy; they deserved what they got. You don't disrupt life and economy just because you've been asked to help keep a virus from spreading and get to get away with it.
And now we'll curtail the rights of people who absolutely do NOT deserve it.
The lurch to the right is deeply inspired by attitudes like this. We even have the Premier of Alberta claiming that unvaccinated people are "the most discriminated against group in history", which, whatever "side" of the vaccination "debate" you fall on, you know is an unbelievably stupid thing to say.
Please, help prevent a drastic lurch to the right by at least reading the lede of an article as well as the headline.
As I'm just a lowly computer technician, no I do not get to choose who gets rights. That is typically the domain of judges, lawmakers, and more fundamentally the founders of nations.
Preventing goods from crossing an international border is called a blockade. In most jurisdictions, this is regarded as a crime and is generally done to harm an economy. Crimes are often punished. Some aren't (like wage theft, not since 1955), but a lot are.
Interfering with a country's ability to trade with another country, as well as publicly threatening to kill law enforcement officers, is quite a serious offence.
I am not certain left-leaning government should not punish crimes, as it's generally seen as a good idea to ensure that activity that disrupts life or liberty of others doesn't happen, and judiciary measures are a part of that. I guess we COULD try an idea in which people are trusted not to do harm, that could be an interesting experiment.
That's absolutely not what a blockade is. Again, by your logic, everyone that was part of the Oka Crisis should've been treated as a foreign enemy or a traitor, and prosecuted as such. I mean, they were armed and wanted indépendance. Yet that's not how it works when you are talking about Canadian citizens.
The exact same logic can also be used to prosecute the people who protested the pipelines in British Columbia. They were literally blocking the construction of a pipeline that was being built literally for international trade.
It's just an insanely dangerous logic, one that can be very conveniently used only against people who usually disagree with you politically.
Like your entire comment reads as a huge far right power fantasy.
Oh and by the way, judges can't do anything w.r.t emergency powers. That's what's so dangerous about them. They remove almost every check and balances.
I guess you're right. A blockade, by definition, is to "render [something] unsuitable for passage". They often have the impact of disallowing goods, people, aid etc from crossing a border (especially when a blockader says "I am blockading to prevent the passage of goods"), but I take your point.
In the UK recently, protesters who blocked major roads to make a point about fossil fuels were imprisoned due to the fact that they were disrupting infrastructure. One elderly protestor has even had to be put back in prison because a medical issue prevented her from being able to wear an ankle tag.
Blocking infrastructure IS generally something that gets punished. But again sometimes it isn't. Quite recently, a protest in London (UK) lead to major roads being blocked with tractors and other agricultural equipment. These protestors have not been charged.
Intent seems to matter. The Coutts and Ottawa guys were blocking infrastructure in protest at being asked to keep a virus under control; the oil protestors in the UK were blocking infrastructure to demonstrate that oil is maybe not great; the agricultural protestors were blockading infrastructure to demonstrate that paying inheritance tax is bad.
Maybe it's not about rights but more about demonstrations that correspond to popularly held positions? I'm not sure. It's something I think about a lot.
I mean don't get me wrong, I absolutely agree that they should have been arrested. I can't think of a single reason why they shouldn't have been. You can't blockade an international border without expecting to be arrested.
The issue wasn't that they were arrested or even charged of anything. The issue is that the government deliberately used the emergency act (which is basically a nuclear bomb) where they could've simply... arrested them. There was no emergency, there was no widespread unrest or any event that was leading to a loss of control. They could've absolutely just arrested everyone, using force if necessary, and moved on. The protestors weren't even armed, they could've just used anti riot police like they always due. As you said yourself, the UK protestors were arrested without using the equivalent of martial law.
So my point isn't that the protestors were innocent, it's that Trudeau's government clearly used the emergency powers act as a way to send a message, and to show that you won't just get arrested but also stripped of your rights completely. Which is to me absolutely abhorrent, and that's coming from someone who actually volunteered for Trudeau's campaign back in 2015 and the election after that one.
I would argue that the unrest was very much widespread. It was just distributed into different forms.
I worked at Chapters for that year, and after we started to require masks in store (we were all getting sick!), I had books thrown at me. That is unrest. What I experienced was NOTHING compared to what grocery store workers went through, nurses, police officers, transit workers... EVERYONE.
Those behaviours were dangerous to society itself; on an individual level, innocent people got hurt for nothing other than simply doing their jobs. On a wider level, had we thrown our hands up and went "okay, you're right. wearing a mask IS the worst oppression anyone has ever faced, Florence Nightingale is a mythical invention by Big Mask, and your individual freedoms are absolutely more important than anything else" and simply let the virus go on unchecked, we might not be posting on a silly orange website now.
I don't know if I completely agree with using the Emergency Powers Act, but it certainly sent a message that said "What we're all going through now is extremely serious. Sit down and let the adults speak."
And I think it worked. Merely arresting the protestors might have just been cutting a head off a hydra.
Maybe.
I don't know. We'll never truly know. It was a weird, lurid time for everyone and nobody knew what the right thing to do was with conviction and certainty. But we must have done something right, because we're still here.
But the incumbents of the day, in every nation, are being blamed. They are being blamed for...letting us continue to live?
It hasn't been a perfect decade. It wasn't under Harper and it won't be under PP, either. Westminster doesn't encourage perfection. Leaders are incentivised to just do enough.
It's going to be a difficult few years for all of us. Well, any of us bring home under $250k anyway.
The protesters at the border could and were arrested without invoking the Emergencies act. The border is under Federal jurisdiction and the laws broken were Federal.
The Emergencies act was invoked to evict the occupiers from Ottawa. They were breaking municipal and provincial laws and on land where the province and city had jurisdiction. The Ottawa city government, the Ottawa police chief and the province were all incompetent and failed to arrest and evict.
Surely there were options like appointing a new police chief which they could have gone to first rather than going straight to emergency powers and suspension of rights?
So, because the provincial government didn't think that the situation justified a harder crackdown, the federal government used exceptional powers, usually used in states of wars, overstepped the locally elected governments and used an exceptional law?
A law that strips people of all of their rights, and suspends the charter? Is that supposed to make it better? Like you realize the provincial and municipal governments were also elected democratically? All of this for a local protest, with no deaths, little physical violence, etc.
I mean, it does give credence that the entire thing happened because poor federal workers were affected, but it's still not a good reason.
> So, because the provincial government didn't think that the situation justified a harder crackdown
Because the provincial government loves it when anything bad happens to Ottawa or when the Federal government gets blamed for something that's their own fault.
If it was Toronto that was occupied, the province would have stepped in early, quickly and decisively.
The federal response was largely due to the abject failure of the city & provincial governments to enforce their laws. The city and province had plenty of tools to get rid of the protesters: noise bylaws, parking bylaws, et cetera. They failed completely, so the Federal government was forced to intervene. The federal government did not have nuanced tools to deal with the truckers so used the blunt hammers they did have.
That's basically what happened. Between the three police forces, the jurisdiction was unclear. Parliamentary police and city police could not decide which laws to enforce as it depended on where the protestors were located. The province mostly polices highways and small townships that cannot afford their own police force. They quickly regained control of the highways to divert any additional incoming trucks but couldn't step in within city limits for trucks that were already there.
Can you explain what these illegal orders were, within the purview of Sloly's role as police chief? Also, who is the second Ottawa police chief you're talking about? For that matter, who is the third one? Furthermore, on what grounds are you claiming that Sloly resigned over illegal orders, when most sources agree it was over failure to perform?
> Furthermore, on what grounds are you claiming that Sloly resigned over illegal orders, when most sources agree it was over failure to perform?
I don't know enough about the situation to have an opinion about much of this, but at least on this one I don't think you need grounds to disbelieve stated reasons for resignation. I've personally witnessed many people resigning and giving reasons like "to focus on my family" or "to focus on my health" or something when in reality they were parachuting out before getting fired or were resigning for other reasons but didn't want to burn a bridge by telling the truth. I wouldn't be surprised if being untruthful (or only partially truthful) in resignations is more the norm than is being honest, and when talking about politics that probably goes up even more.
>but at least on this one I don't think you need grounds to disbelieve stated reasons for resignation.
I don't even see a contradiction in the first place. Of course someone who perceives received orders as illegal, and feels strongly enough about it to consider resigning, would "fail to perform" those orders.
I stand corrected that it Sloly was the 2nd police chief during the protest, not sure how or when I warped that in my mind to thinking that he was the 2nd resignation.
My point still stands though and as you say: he was pressured to resign because he wouldn't do what the politicians were demanding of him - which is in line with your "failure to perform" claim.
The actions then done under the Emergencies Act to "clear" the Freedom Convoy from downtown were found to have been illegally invoked.
And you know crime in Ottawa went down during the Freedom Convoy too, right?
Have you put your shoes in the Freedom Convoy participants at all I wonder to balance your perspective? Do you care about the RCMP horses trampling and breaking bones of an elder disabled indigenous woman, who just moments before was basically preaching about love and peace?
I can find that video for you if you'd like, if you haven't seen it.
Otherwise it's not worth it to put anymore of my time to debate this one on one, when I'm responding to someone who tries to support their argument with "when most sources agree" without citing any sources, and where I can predict which sources you'll cite.
At some point they stopped being protestors and became occupiers. There is no Charter right to occupy—as the pro-Palestinian folks also learned [1] (which was simply re-iterating previous precedent, see perhaps [2]).
It's quite clear what the limits are for protests in Ottawa. There are dozens to hundreds of protesters in Ottawa continuously. There are regularly protests of thousands of people. If you want to block the road, you get a parade permit which is easy to get. You can shout as long as you want, but if you use an amplifier the police will eventually take it away from you. You can carry obnoxious signs. Blocked roads because of protests are an annoying fact of life in Ottawa. But you shrug and move on, it's a cost of living/working in downtown Ottawa. I've never seen a protest block the road for more than 4 hours.
Yes, they harassed people, they cornered people, yes they restricted access to stores, buildings, and yes they used their truck horns to attack local residents by preventing them being able to sleep for days on end. Preventing people from sleeping via loud noise is literally considered a torture tactic.
You've repeatedly been posting in the flamewar style to this thread. That's not ok, as you know (or ought to, having been here for a good 14 years), so please stop.
Edit: we've had to warn you about this countless times, and you've continued to break the site guidelines badly, including in other threads than this. I'm not going to ban you right now, just as I haven't banned a different flamewar commenter (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42615795), but the same things apply to you as I said to them: this is not ok, and if you don't want to be banned here we need you to fix this once and for all.
It's fascinating how the same arguments can apply to the homeless, but how one sees the homeless vs. the truck protestors is likely to be polar opposites with one group free to stay as they aren't infringing on any rights, and the other group being a nuisance and having to go expeditiously. Which group is tolerated largely depends on your political alignment.
In what world is it ok to subject people to sleep deprivation techniques because “ear plugs exist”? That’s basically saying “I am allowed to enact violence on you, because painkillers exist”.
In addition to how absurd that is, I don’t think this would pass any kind of “pub test”.
YSK that the people who had their accounts frozen weren't simply protesting in Ottawa; they were blocking international borders to our largest trading partner, effectively holding our economy hostage. This absolutely constitutes behavior that's a danger to our nation so it makes sense to freeze the accounts of the people doing it. To be clear, there were many attempts to settle this without freezing people's bank accounts, but when nothing else works sometimes you have to get out the big guns.
That logic seems like it would outlaw labor strikes too, especially in important industries. Sometimes, holding the economy hostage is the point.
I take exception to the framing of “attempts to settle this.” The government used violence and threat of violence to make the problem go away. There wasn’t an attempt at compromise. Do what I say or else isn’t an attempt to settle.
That's how analogies are supposed to work. How do you expect civil society to function if people only supported civil disobedience when it's their preferred cause?
The recent postal strikes in Canada are an example of the situation you're describing. Eventually the federal government had to step in and break the strike to get the mail system moving again - if the workers refused to comply, against the orders of the government, I actually think strong measures like the freezing of bank accounts would be warranted and supported by most Canadians.
The government should be able to force people to work under worse conditions and less pay they want to? That’s ok if most Canadians support it? Really? I hope you can appreciate just how dangerous this sounds, even if you think my slippery slope has a lot of traction on it.
Out of curiosity, how do you feel about labor strikes? If customs, border control, longshoremen, or some other union decided to strike and picket would you support having the feds declare them terrorists and doing the banking thing?
Stop Oil glue themselves to the road in cities as a protest, disrupting the economic output of major cities. They haven't been treated like a terrorist organisation.
Actually the Harper gov't passed laws when in power that enabled them to treat such protests against fossil fuels as terrorist or threat-to-national-security events.
And pipeline blocking protests in BC saw fairly heavy handed police intervention under the Trudeau govt. Those blockades were cleared by the RCMP, quite aggressively, something which the police basically refused to do for the convoy protest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Canadian_pipeline_and_rai...
I don't think it's really that cut and dry of a comparison in favour of your argument. Oil and gas protests in Canada have been treated more aggressively than the convoy was.
This is what a protest is. (French here). If protesters go as far, and in Canada it was because you did them dirty, then you must sit at a table and negotiate. You must sit at a table and negotiate with everyone in a country. You cannot do someone dirty then complain that they protest.
It’s effects removing the right to protest, and therefore, removing democracy itself. Go live in Singapore?
They became occupiers when they started living in their trucks. There is no right to occupy in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
If they had slow-rolled their trucks to create traffic jams that is a protest and would have been quite another thing (but also generally illegal, e.g., Ontario Highway Traffic Act §132).
If you don't like what the government is doing elect a new government: that's what elections are for. You don't get to throw a hissy fit and mess up other people's lives and livelihood every time there's a decision you don't like.
Every society is about balancing the rights of the individual and the rights of the collective, and their responsibilities as well. About balancing of different rights when they are in opposition to each other.
Not a Canadian, but no, a protest protests and gives voice to the disagreement. Blocking other people's rights is not just a protest and is likely to trigger action to protect others. That's how it goes everywhere that has rights. Normally, some effort is made to do it peacefully, but there are no countries where you can halt the economy whenever you want to force people to negotiate with you.
I don't agree. There were a bunch of university protests over Gaza (slapped down for stupid reasons by university administrators under pressure from government), and, really, they just made noise, but they got a lot of people to notice, including myself. And to ask ourselves, what do I think about this?
If you are expecting protests to force someone's hand, that isn't protest or protected political speech, that's coercion. Some forms of that are legal (e.g., strikes), but there are pretty sharply defined limits.
Preferably online, but not on a website that everyone sees. Something silent. On the side. Also please have the dignity to die in peace, not commit suicide in a place where everyone can see it.
I mean, this is the French way. SNCF striking (a yearly occurrence) is arguably halting the economy each time it happens.
As a sympathizer to the HK protests, I've heard all these talking points before -- that the protesters are ruining the economy and making things miserable for everyone. Usually the protests can really only get so big when there is a shared grievance that keeps getting ignored by the administration.
In the case of HK, the grievance was the possibility for criminals to be extradited to Chinese mainland.
In the case of convoy protests, the grievance was the vaccine mandate in order to work a trucking job that's mostly solitary with minimal human contact.
Please, disagreeing on a topic and providing arguments is one thing, but suggesting somebody go live in another country because you don’t agree with them on something that happened in their country is disrespectful.
Speaking as someone who has been in dozens of protests in my life: yes, that is what protest is, and as a protester engaging in civil disobedience you expect the response from authorities. That is exactly the point. When I have been on the receiving end of tear gas, there was no surprise. Big duh.
Crying because your illegal civil disobedience led to civil reaction by the law is the height of "oh no the leopard ate my face" idiocy.
They weren't punished by the law though, they were debanked in an era where you need to use the banks to eat, pay rent and to merely survive. That is above and beyond any legal punishment. It is economic banishment and it is se excessive that it alone should be shunned by any person who wants civilization to survive.
I mean, the South in the US waged a really big protest because they wanted slaves, and we murdered each other enough that they sort of changed their mind. Not every political grievance is on the right side of history.
> But Anthony Olienick and Chris Carbert were both convicted on other charges of mischief and possession of a weapon for a dangerous purpose. Olienick was also convicted of possessing a pipe bomb.
> "It was an overcharge to begin with," Beyak said.
> He said if police tried to storm the barricade, he would "slit their throats."
They won't tell you this because the patchwork of regulations makes it literally impossible to do so legally but a very large minority, perhaps brushing up to scant majority depending on where you measure, of truckers in North America pack heat. They're in and out of all sorts of sketchy places all the time, never have local knowledge and would be insanely easy pickings for various types of career criminals if they (as a class of people) were not a risky target.
Can't speak for Canada, but this is definitely true in the US. I have no data other than my girlfriends dad (who I spent a lot of time with) was a trucker who refused to carry (and was a big fan of Michael Moore and Fahrenheit 9/11, mentioned so you know his bias) who got into a lot of debates with his coworkers about it. In the western US where the gun laws are more friendly, "damn near everyone" kept at least a pistol. At one point he actually started carrying as well after getting (wrongly, he claims :-D) roughed up by a pimp at a remote truck stop.
Fortunate for him, he benefit from all his coworkers having a pu lic reputation for packing heat even though he didn't approve of it himself. The criminals who might otherwise try to take advantage of him wouldn't know that he was unarmed, but would be wary of truckers in general.
I think the implication was that he may have had some hand (or other body part) in the creation of that situation. It wasn't just some criminals saying "oh, a trucker, this will be easy money".
Not sure that distinction matters? In the “guns prevent violence” framing, the pander should have been afraid of the alleged john being armed, and not attempted physical violence.
You could be right, but it could also be that it was common knowledge that he was anti-gun because he never was shy of sharing his opinion, and it's very common for the same truckers to do the same routes repeatedly. I don't think there's enough evidence either way in this anecdote to make any reasonable conclusions.
If you think criminals don't consider the risk of being shot when picking their targets, I'm afraid it is you who is fantasizing. Robberies aren't "crimes of passion" where emotions overrule normal common sense.
I don't know about the details of this prosecution, but having served on juries, it is important to remember than "not guilty" is a finding that the government didn't meet the burden of proof, not necessarily a finding of actual innocence. That article would certainly suggest that they were prepared for violence, even if acquitted on the most serious charge.
>but when nothing else works sometimes you have to get out the big guns.
Isn't that why you have the police, army, etc? You use force to remove those people breaking the laws, not go after their families. That's some USSR shit.
> Isn't that why you have the police, army, etc? You use force to remove those people breaking the laws, not go after their families. That's some USSR shit.
Nobody went after anyone's family.
If you solicit donations to fund a criminal act, you lose access to the money you raise. This is a thing that happens in normal crime too. Its not just an emergency act thing.
People forget that many of the protestors who lost banking access wasn't due to the emergency act, but because one pissed off ottawa resident sued them in civil court and obtained a court order to that affect.
I think this is better framed as "joined the protest", from the perspective of the police. As a US analogy, sanctuary cities or states with "legalized" marijuana have police who are refusing to do their job. Should thenfederal government freeze the accounta of police officers until they do?
If the thing your doing is causing such unrest, perhaps the government shouldn't be doing that thing.
> The truckers were warned what would happen, and they made their families pay the price.
This is a terrifying comment and you should really start re-examining your outlook on life. I really hope you are nowhere near any sort of lever of power.
> I'm not on the pulse of Canadian politics, so I don't really know what sins or political circumstances have led Trudeau to this point, or if he has any redeeming qualities. Personally, I'm glad to see him gone.
This seems like a pretty big conclusion to reach based on one article and one topic, no? Especially when you, in the same sentence, also recognize that you don't follow Canadian politics?
Debanking someone in our current society is the most abusive things they could have done. It prevented people from accessing and using their own money in an era that is almost cashless. It effectively starved people out and left them trapped. It is so excessively overboard, yet there are those here who will defend it because it happened to those not on their side. When the government changes and it is used against them they will shout and holler with surprise. I'll never understand how people don't see how something that you allow the government to do to others will eventually be used against you too. It's only happened every goddamn time throughout history.
> Offtopic to politics, but browsers these days support arbitrary text anchors.
Find this extremely annoying, especially in search results: I want to start at the beginning of the article/post, and not some random place in the middle—which is where the highlighted snippet in the search results are from, but not helpful for learning the larger context.
It also tends to mess up URLS that you may want to copy-paste as it has that text parameter garbage at the end (often with a sizeable amount of text that needs to be removed).
Agreed. I'm in the minority I'm sure, but I think this is an anti-feature. In addition to your good points, it's also very fragile as a small change in the text of the page can break the link. It also leads to monstrous URLs that are quite hard to read for people who don't know about this feature.
It's a great way to link to the source of a verbatim quote, though. It goes straight to the relevant context, and breaks only if the source of the quote itself is somehow changed, making the new inconsistency clear.
I've seen it used countless times before, but I thought it was something somehow being injected into the page by a search engine (especially when it comes from custom site searches on forums), rather than a browser feature.
I don’t follow Canadian politics, and I don’t know that much about Trudeau, but having the capital full of honking, mad truckers, holding the government hostage for their demands to be met in a time of crisis sounds like an absolute nightmare.
There had already been one standoff between local residents and truckers, I remember there being chatter that the next weekend groups were going to coordinate in their neighborhoods and drive out the convoy on their own (using baseball bats, cast iron skillets, or golf clubs if need be). The situation had the potential to turn into an absolute blood bath.
In the US some psychopath straight up shot and killed a climate activist who was in the way of his car. It’s a miracle something similar didn’t happen there.
OP is probably conflating the environmentalist protestor shot in the US by cops and the numerous racial justice protestors killed by motorists, along with the incident you mentioned. Easy mistake to make.
Do we think it might be a little intellectually dishonest to equate a peaceful political protest with an armed hostage-taker?
I think this is important regardless of whether you believe in their specific target of protest or not. The right to peacefully protest is very very important, and your feelings on a specific protest should be wholly divorced from the importance of preserving the right to protest in general.
Nobody was held hostage. People unhappy with their rulers took peacefully to the streets and made noise and peacefully and temporarily interfered with some business activity.
This is the furthest thing from “holding the government hostage”. It’s the adversarial relationship between the populace and the state working exactly as intended and designed.
Armed hostage-taker? It’s unfortunate you feel the need to misrepresent my position rather than address the real issue.
This kind of distortion suggests an agenda. Regardless how sympathetic you might feel towards the protesters and the politicians standing behind them, we should focus on honest dialogue.
It is a fact that the protest was done in a way which disrupted the lives of the residents and jeopardized their safety. The right to peacefully protest comes with a responsibility, and the context in which it’s done matters greatly.
For example, a counter protest by medical workers was cancelled when a state of emergency was announced. Look no further for a model of responsibility in public discourse. We should make sure the voices of responsible citizens are amplified, not drowned out by furious hostility.
“holding [whatever] hostage” means an armed attacker and threat to life. It’s no misrepresentation, you were using exaggerated and hyperbolic terms to describe a peaceful protest.
Nobody’s safety was jeopardized. Some disruption is the point of a protest; you can’t operate the building during a sit-in, for example.
“protest in a way that doesn’t affect anything and allows society to ignore you” is not a legitimate or constructive type of feedback.
As a Canadian I can say that most people I know have opinions about the protests and the government's response, but that whole affair is about 1,000th on the list of grievances we have with our current federal government.
It's a strangely American abstraction to focus on this as the animating issue around Trudeau's government and does not reflect Canadian reality on the ground.
The protests lasted quite a long time and I think the public's opinion on it changed over time.
At the beginning, most left-wing/centrist sorts of people saw it as an annoyance, but Ottawa is used to protests. Within the first week or so, people were bringing their kids to the event
After the first week or so (again, going by memory here), I think the general perception of danger started increasing dramatically. Most of the kids were gone, replaced my angry men with nothing better to do. In hindsight, nothing happened during the occupation, but given the overlap with the sorts of people who own guns (remember, the border blockade in Alberta at the same time did see people with guns), I think people were legitimately scared. The police certainly were too scared to do anything!
There was also a scare at the time at an apartment building in Centretown where someone tried to barricade the doors and light it on fire. This happened during the convoy, and while nothing happened and it seems it may have been unrelated mischief, we can only say that in hindsight. At the time it was very scary. There was another incident where truckers were showing up at a local school and yelling at people.
I think most people supported the Trudeau government in putting an end to it with the Emergencies Act, which later was found to be unconstitutional. It was pretty popular at the time. The general perception was that the federal government was doing what the provincial government (despite what Doug Ford thinks, Ottawa is actually in Ontario!) should have done weeks ago.
Thanks for replying. As a non-Canadian, your response has been more informative than the weeks I spent reading Twitter trying to figure out what was happening.
How bad were the covid restrictions in Canada that the truckers were complaining about in 2022? By 2022 most of the world had gone back to normal business-as-usual. Why were they even protesting? As an outsider looking in, it seemed like a mix of ignorance, propaganda, and stupidity made them do it.
Without looking up the specifics, by the time of the convoy, the vast majority of covid restrictions were gone. They liked to complain about vaccine passports, which Canada had, but by 2022 the vaccine passports were gone everywhere except the US border, by the request of the US government. So, from the outside, these guys were protesting and occupying Ottawa over actions of the US government. On the other hand, these guys don't really like being talked down to no matter what the elites say the real problem is. It started as a protest against vaccine passports but really turned into a ragefest against the establishment.
It's important to note that some of the key people who were behind these protests were not truckers, but were involved in earlier attempts at mass protest in Ottawa as part of the 'yellow vests' group from 2019
How are Canadians occupying Canadian cities supposed to lift US restrictions? They can't, that's how. Again, it's stupidity, ignorance, and probably some propaganda/misinformation that spurred them on.
"How are Canadians occupying Canadian cities supposed to lift US restrictions?:"
They can protest (which they did) and Justin Trudeau could have picked up the phone and call Biden and ask to remove the restriction, which at that time of the pandemic was completely useless. Instead, Justin Trudeau played politics, he figured it was much better for him to divide the population on the issue than actually work with its biggest trade partner to remove the restriction.
Thing is that Canada already had the mandate delayed once by request to the US prior to it coming into effect, I believe it was 6 months delayed already.
The level of vitriol reserved for Trudeau on this topic is strange, considering it was US-driven policy.
Also strange considering the vast majority of "vaccine mandate" policy in Canada was provincial in jurisdiction, and the federal gov't only had control over ports and borders, so really didn't do much on the "mandate" file outside of that.
The reality is that this convoy was targeted for Ottawa and the Canadian govt because that govt was seen as weak and more easily undermined. The chief organizers are far right radicals whose previous involvements had been around protesting climate change initiatives and in favour of the oil and gas sector ("yellow vest" convoy in favour of pipelines and stuff)
The same kinds of protests done on the US side would have been met with far more severe consequences.
Now we're getting into the real meat of the questions. I love Kraft Dinner, in a somewhat ironic way. The best way to eat it is to add hot dog slices while cooking the pasta, then top it with ketchup. You can also have it with hot dogs and beans on the side (as my dad would call it, "beans and wieners and Kraft Dinner") It sounds disgusting, but its comfort food. Not sure if I would like it if I hadn't grown up eating it.
It might be an English Canadian thing. My partner is French Canadian and thinks its disgusting.
> The government(s) went way overboard with Pfizer proof of purchase QR codes to get lunch. Especially when uptake was 80%+
> They also went overboard by locking down again over the holidays when everyone was already catching the most contagious Omicron. People not being able to go to a gym to stay fit, that already needed a barcode, swayed a lot of the public that things were going on too long.
> But the obnoxiousness of the truckers also went too far for too long. The news of rifles and arrests in Alberta was (obviously) too far.
> I don't have a citation on hand, but at one point more than a third of Canadians did support either the truckers explicitly or their aims, and that's a higher percentage than voted for the current governing party. Support was higher among younger people, sometimes over 50%. But this percentage decreased as time went on.
> The government also completely failed to act diplomatically or to de-escalate the situation. Instead we had inflammatory rhetoric and a focus on some silly flags (which should be condemned, but a lot of people have doubts as to their sincerity, and I've seen some pretty gross signs against the unvaxxed too)
> Some people, even in this comment section, take their rhetoric and opposition too far.
> There is no doubt in my mind that the more time passes, the more we will look at Canada's response to the pandemic (especially in its later years) as a horrendous failure that harmed trust in public health, harmed social cohesion, and harmed our democratic and civil institutions. Everyone failed and everyone suffered as a result.
You mentioned specifically restrictions on lunch. Do you just mean that there are more office workers eating lunch because it is during the day? Or were the vaccine passport rules different depending on what meal or time of day?
It was just an example - in most places the vaccine passports were required for any sit down service where you have a server (not fast food or to go orders)
Quebec did impose curfews, and overall had the strictest restrictions by a long way. Around the time of the protests there were plans to tax or fine the unvaccinated and big box retailers were already restricting access to all parts of the store save for the pharmacy.
I guess what I'm not getting here is this: the rage about the "everyone that went too far" doesn't seem to have extended to the people who actually did that. By which I mean our provincial governments, with their ad hoc dubious and last minute irrational responses. Specifically, Doug Ford who seems to have suffered not a bit in terms of support but enacted the most draconian of COVID restrictions and lockdowns, all at the last minute and after numbers were skyrocketing, not before...
Meanwhile Trudeau did what... airports and borders. The feds influence here was not high. ArriveCAN was a debacle, obviously. But the trucker thing was US initiated.
I don't think there's anything the feds could have done to head this off. They couldn't make the trucker vax thing not happen, not with Biden insisting on it. They had no control over what was happening in workplaces and schools across the country. Their biggest fault, I think, was being weak -- which the opposition took advantage of to create mayhem and try to bring the govt down.
That the people organizing the protest were in part former oil industry lobbyists and had previously been involved in climate change denying anti-carbon tax protests should also make one pause about what the motivations might be and where the money might be coming from, as well?
Regardless, I think we agree: by January with Omicron showing that it would transmit like crazy regardless of vaccine, mandates everywhere should have been dropped.
The protests in Ottawa and the two border crossings ballooned from just being about the trucker mandates (which really didn't impact that many people, since trucking industry reps reported rates of vaccination in line with the general population) to being an all-out protest against restrictions in general. I did see several protests in BC, including at the legislature.
What the federal government could have at least tried, in my opinion, was to be humble and release the tension. Trudeau's sanctimoniousness manifested itself too strongly and only escalated the situation, which he had seen coming earlier in the year by calling mandates "divisive" - presumably before polling numbers showed that Canadians are mostly a compliant bunch who didn't have much time for tinfoil hat types (research by UBC and VCH later showed that those already disadvantaged, such as the homeless, were vaccinated at a lower rate than the general population and disproportionately impacted by mandates. I'd love to link citations here but finding 2-3+ year old studies and articles is painful) Instead, several of Trudeau's statements at this time, including "do we tolerate these people" became rallying cries for the populists.
Ok: what could the feds do to release tension, concretely? They had no ability to undo any mandates, since 90% of them came from the provinces, not the feds. Likewise, the trucker thing was coming from the US.
I guess they could have maybe done some changes in tone -- but they may also have been seen by the population as giving into what were frankly seen by most as fringe radicals.
And finally, the actual leaders of the convoy would not have been interested. This wasn't their first rodeo. They wanted to bring the govt down, and not because of COVID but because of everything -- they had previously been in Ottawa trying to pull a similar thing around "pipelines" and carbon tax.
People on hn seem weirdly obsessed with trudeau's handling of the trucker protest. Regardless of what you think of it, at this point it is very old news and trudeau's actions were controversial but largely popular.
The handling of the trucker protest is not why he resigned. It is not why he is unpopular.
I live and work with mostly conservatives and none of them supported the truckers nor do they even mention it. Their grievances are more typical - inflation, taxes, and immigration.
I think we need to be careful when reading these opinions to not mix up Americans’ views, Russian trolls with legitimate Canadian discourse.
I’ve noticed a ton of non-Canadians like to reference this event as if it’s some incredible example of government tyranny gone too far. Nearly anyone who lived in Ottawa during this time (like me) would say the police completely failed the city, and the “protests” went on for literal weeks too long due to inaction and incompetence by all levels of government.
Hacker News is pretty much far right when it comes to politics. Heck the moderators refused to allow any criticism of the monarchy when the queen died but allowed it when Jimmy Carter died.
> Whatever you think of the truckers' position or protest tactics, any punishment for their actions ought to go through the laws and court system.
Your personal opinion seems to be completely uninformed or misinformed, by the way you tried to frame it as something done to truckers instead of what it actually was: lifting a blockade.
It's even more baffling when taken into account the alleged motivation: COVID-19 restrictions.
> I'm not on the pulse of Canadian politics, (...)
>'The intent was not to get at the families', and when a democratic government starts a sentence that way something deeply #&$#ed up has happened."
Wait, are people that shocked that their democratic governments are wiling to act like mobsters/dictators against a minority group just to get their way and appease a majority, when the history books are full of such examples? People must have a short memory then and why history repeating itself is a fact.
Would you please stop posting in the flamewar style to HN? Your account unfortunately has been doing this repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
To be clear, is "Anyone who doesn't like this should think about which members of their immediate family they want included in that 70,000 deaths." not also the same sort of flamewar style?
Indeed it is, and I posted a similar moderation request to that user (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42614856) 37 seconds after posting the GP. I'm afraid I operate serially!
You know what would actually help dang? Actually telling what exactly was flamewar about that comment instead of flexing the mod status and being biased and double standard with your selective enforcement bs just because some butthurt pussies here abuse the flag button? Talk to them instead to stop that abuse.
What exactly was flamewar about posting that countries of people aren't guinea pig cages? Go on, enlighten me please. What rule did that comment break? Did you even read my comment or are you swinging your hammer based on people abusing the flag button?
I know that a detailed personalized response is more helpful, but it's impossible to do that in every case because it's so time consuming. I could spend all waking hours doing nothing but that and still only cover a fraction of the customized explanations that people want—even before counting the fact that many explanations generate further questions that need further explanation. So we have to get by with shorthand most of the time.
In your case, I wasn't just responding to one comment but to your pattern of commenting; note the word "repeatedly" in my post. That's a reference to other comments like these, from the current thread:
Your pattern of commenting includes inflammatory rhetoric, being aggressive to other users, cross-examination, name-calling, political and ideological battle, sneering at the rest of the community, and other things that clearly break the HN guidelines–and that's just with your current account.
It's true that your comment that I replied to (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42612748) was one of the lesser cases of this, but it still included inflammatory rhetoric ("and if my mom had balls she's be my dad" adds no information—it's just a putdown, and ditto for "America, Australia, Canada, Europe etc, aren't interchangeable lab cages of guinea pigs", since no one is arguing that they are). But the rest of that comment was fine. The reason I replied there is not because I thought it was the worst case, but because it was a leaf node in the thread.
In any case, the issue (as I said) is the pattern. You're breaking the site guidelines so often that your account is on the line of being one that we would ban, if not already over the line.
Would you please stop posting flamewar comments to HN? We've had to ask you this so many times I don't even want to bother digging up all the links. As I'm sure I've said more than once before, we'll have to ban you if you keep this up, so please just stop.
As somebody who lived in Ottawa at the time, this was not good coverage. Neither was DHH's. It was incredibly rage-inducing to read in real time as it was happening too. My takeaway from this is that one should minimize the confidence in one's opinion of foreign events.
"I'm not on the pulse of Canadian politics, so I don't really know what sins or political circumstances have led Trudeau to this point, or if he has any redeeming qualities. Personally, I'm glad to see him gone."
> I don't really know what sins or political circumstances have led Trudeau to this point
> Personally, I'm glad to see him gone
Why do people do this? You don't keep up with Canadian politics and you don't know what led Trudeau to this point, yet you're glad he's gone? Is it not OK anymore to just not have opinions either way, and people have to take a stance on everything?
I mean, are we really nth-handed? The sad thing about, as they say "Sleeping with the Elephant" is you get first hand experience of the elephant's ... movements ... even if they never notice yours.
Trade war against Canada can have pretty dire consequences, and so putting aside all the other things people say about Trump... the fact of the matter is he slapped massive tariffs on us last time around and is talking about doing worse this time around... so we have pretty 1st hand legit concerns
While I agree with patio11's assessment here, if you were to poll the average Ottawan about the trucker protest, you'll largely get back a response of "#&$! those people", soley because they were minorly-inconvenienced by them.
Canadian politics (not uniquely here) is plagued with petty squabbles. The really meaningful political and social issues don't get any airtime.
Have you ever actually been to downtown Ottawa, where those protests were held?
It's not "a residential area" in any sense.
The moderately-wide Ottawa River forms the north-west edge of the downtown area.
Along it are the Alexandra Bridge, Major's Hill Park, the Rideau Canal, Parliament Hill, the Supreme Court, Library and Archives Canada, and other government-related buildings and infrastructure. Those aren't residential.
Immediately south-east of those is Wellington Street, where those protests were held, literally right in front of Parliament Hill. It's about as close as they could physically get to the Parliament Buildings.
South-west of that, there are numerous government office buildings, commercial office buildings, small shops, restaurants, a few hotels, and so on for a number of blocks. Again, those aren't residential.
Also keep in mind that the government-imposed lockdowns and other restrictions being protested were preventing or severely limiting the use of the offices, hotels, restaurants, and other businesses in the area.
You have to go out about 1 km from Parliament Hill before you even begin to start encountering any significant number of apartment buildings and residences.
Downtown Ottawa is not "a residential area", and those protesters were in the most relevant, appropriate, and reasonable place they could have been to protest policies imposed by the Government of Canada.
When you say it is not a residential area in “any sense” and he finds a counterexample showing it is clearly a residential area in some sense then what you said is just untrue.
I'll play: we can find 1m² of road in the residential area that is obviously not residential. Now we have two counterexamples that conflict. Logically the premise is meaningless.
i dont see why a bit of road would justify honking the horn all night at an apartment building though. can you elborate on what changes when there's a road? the apartment building has people sleeping in it.
Both of these links state pretty clearly that she lives in London. In the UK.
It isn't uncommon for posh famous people to have their posh second, third, etc., residences in places that where normal regular people don't actually live...like Downtown Ottawa.
Were you in the location at that time? Because you are speculating based on a perfunctory knowledge of the map. I live in this "non-residential" area along with tens of thousands of others. The truckers were not just occupying Wellington, they were on all streets till Somerset between Elgin and Bronson. And hundreds of vehicles blaring horns together reaches very far.
No they're not, at least not in Ottawa at 2AM. They might do a quick blip at an intersection but generally they run silent. There was a massive difference between the train horns and the sirens. The horns were continuous, sirens are very occasional and short.
If you live around a million other people, you're going to have to deal with loud noise in the middle of the night at some point. Scale this up or down depending on how many people you're living near.
For the entire time that I lived in Manhattan, loud noise at 2am was unavoidable. You get thick windows, leave them closed, buy curtains and run your AC.
The loud noise is a rare and short event, not a nightly recurring occurrence of a long loud continuous blare. If it was as you say, then the protestors wouldn’t be doing it to gain attention.
Yes, a group of people decided that the only way to get their message across was to be assholes for a while.
I would label this as an inconvenience.
A bunch of Canadians, including commenters in this thread, believe it to be terrorism.
Terrorism to justify removing these peoples rights and not addressing their concerns.
I'm so glad for you Canadians that this Trucker Protest was the closest thing that your nation can approximate to Terrorism. I don't consider this a serious perspective though.
I don’t think it’s terrorism but that’s not why the back accounts were frozen.
The people involved with noise pollution should definitely have been handed significant fines and escalating punishments similar to anyone violating noise ordinances. It gets trickier since these actions are in support of a larger organized effort but that should be the minimum punishment.
The terrorism aspect comes from shutting down trade on a hugely important trade route with our largest trading partner, holding the economy hostage to make demands of the government. That by itself isn’t terrorism per se but the legitimate threats to use violence to keep the embargo going fits the textbook definition of terrorism, using violence or threats of violence to achieve political goals.
Who has called the truck horns terrorism? I see people calling sleep deprivation torture, and I see people calling an armed border occupation terrorism.
At a minimum they were actually taking proactive action to be nuisances in solidarity with terrorists. Whether that makes you a terrorist I don’t know, but historically governments frown on those providing any kind of support to terrorists and tend to use the transitive property when dealing with such actions.
Are you trying to compare an emergency vehicle -- which is there to save someone's life -- with someone blasting a train horn outside your house to harass your neighbourhood as a deliberate political tactic? Are you looking to imply that all noises, for all reasons, at all hours, are equal, and therefore what they did is beyond reproach?
As a follow-up question -- were you impacted by this event? Were you there, even momentarily?
> if you were to poll the average Ottawan about the trucker protest, you'll largely get back a response of "#&$! those people", soley because they were minorly-inconvenienced by them
This just illustrates why pure/Athenian democracy doesn’t work. Madness of the crowds and all that. Decide most issues by plebescite and you get an emotional outcome.
I can't imagine looking at Republican Rome or any of the tyrants in the ancient world and thinking they're better.
The Republic fell because a bunch of senators were too greedy and refused to do basic land reform or anything else to make life better for anyone other than themselves.
There's no shortage of absolutely insane tyrants that made people's lives miserable.
> soley because they were minorly-inconvenienced by them
The trucker protests were right in the middle of the Covid supply chain issues. Not defending the actions taken in particular, but it had the potential to be a much worse issue than a minor inconvenience.
Is this where the meme about Canadians being very polite comes from - a tendency towards pettiness rather than really nasty political rifts? (I don't know anything about Canadian culture)
I had some of my best times in Quebec (City). I felt super welcome despite only speaking English.
I do understand where you're getting at though, and trust me, if you go to Berlin and you only speak English, you'll get far worse than you would from the Québécois for doing the same.
It's almost like those Americans who give people shit for not speaking English, except we have even less entitlement to that.
1/3 of the country's entire population is in the GTA. That brief moment is the most contact that Canadians will have with each other on any given day.
And they treat everyone worse than garbage. I've been in busier commuter zones that have been far more civil than that.
Even the drunks going home on the LIRR are better than that.
I won't disagree with you that Canadians are great people -- I spent a lot of time living there for a reason -- but you have to judge people by when their hair is down, not their Sunday best.
And yet if you go there at commuter times and spend 5 minutes just observing, I'm sure you'll feel the same way.
The funniest thing about the responses here to me is that not a single person has disputed the characterization I presented -- what I'm describing seems to be clear enough to everyone.
There were four people with Nazi flags in the beginning who disappeared almost instantly. A classic way of discrediting a protest. (A real Nazi however received a warm reception in the Canadian parliament: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-66943005)
No one had a pro-Putin sign? Why would they? At that time Putin was sitting at 20m long tables, which should have pleased Fauci himself. Putin was "following the science"!
I'm really opposed to this classic way of mixing an imaginary "far right" with Putin as if they do not have their own grievances.
You are right about the honking, which should have been dealt with more quickly but stopped after an injunction after a couple of days.
> I'm not on the pulse of Canadian politics, so I don't really know what sins or political circumstances have led Trudeau to this point, or if he has any redeeming qualities. Personally, I'm glad to see him gone.
Uh really? Is this another version of “Both sides” claiming you don’t know the pulse whilst amplifying a more right leaning, niche, view?
Niche view? Nobody likes Trudeau, not even is own party that is why they are pressuring him to step down. The comment you are commenting on might not be well thought out or in depth but it is how MANY average Canadians feel.
Is it me or does it seem like the internet era has taken away incumbent advantage and actually put incumbents at a massive disadvantage? I'm not here to attack or defend what Trudeau has actually done, only to posit the idea that once you become a leader in the political landscape there is a very effective machine whose only job is to attack you, personally, as much as possible anywhere you're perceived to be vulnerable. If you've followed US politics for the last decade the perfect example of this is "tan suit".
When Trudeau first took office, he was the meme of being Canada's young and handsome PM, and he enjoyed a good few years of "honeymoon" period that many leaders can only wish for.
I think the problem is that a large and growing part of the population is in a constant state of dissatisfaction, if not downright anger, often being fed or demanding simple solutions to complex problems. At that point it doesn't seem to matter if those solutions actually work as long as they promise change. And when it becomes clear they won't or require long term planning people will just demand new leadership and the cycle continues.
Let's face it. Most problems require patient approaches. Often changes that are made won't show their effects until years or decades later. Unfortunately that encourages short term thinking towards the next election in government and population alike.
It's an interesting theory, but there are other hypotheses out there. One I've heard a lot is that the post-pandemic inflation surge hit everyone, and made all incumbents unpopular. I suppose that if the anti-incumbent results across the globe continue for several more years, we will be able to rule that out?
It's also easier to lie about what the current government has done wrong, there are no laws against it.
You can just lie at a velocity never seen before on this planet, spread falsehoods via social media, breed outrage, spread conspiracies and then elected.
"The bitterness and rivalries seen in the partisan 1796 campaign got worse in the 1800 rematch between Adams and Jefferson. At one point in that race, Jefferson’s supporter, notorious pamphleteer James Calendar, claimed that Adams was a hermaphrodite, while Adams’ people said Jefferson would openly promote prostitution, incest, and adultery..."
Inflation, distrust of authorities after COVID, deliberate (and automated) spread of disinformation, outright war in Europe, climate change becoming increasingly obvious with nobody doing anything about it (but people very angry any time somebody attempts to do something about it... etc)
It's not a fun time, and I'd hate to be "in charge"
I follow US politics regularly, but I hadn't heard of this so I don't know how well it's known... but it has it's own page so maybe I'm in the minority here.
The machine isn't against the incumbent, it wants to move things to the right. This is why Obama gets mainstream media outrage for superficial things like wearing a tan suit. Also it is why Biden (correctly) got a lot of negative coverage for being too old to serve but people like Trump or Kay Ivey relatively get a pass.
The right also had incumbent disadvantage this year. See:
- Britain's Tory defeat.
- India's and Hungary's main party still winning, but by less than expected. India's main party no longer holds a majority in Parliament.
- In South Korea, the liberal opposition has won the majority of seats in the National Assembly.
Even in developing countries, incumbent disadvantage is almost everywhere. Look at the map in https://abcnews.go.com/538/democrats-incumbent-parties-lost-.... And in a couple examples where the majority gained (Mexico, Dominican Republic, Moldova) they are the left.
Indeed, Trudeau had the whole state-funded media to use as his propaganda apparatus on his side - and it's why free speech is under threat trying in Canada and elsewhere, them trying to manufacture consent by so-called "hate speech" for the fascists to gain more control to censor-suppress dissidents who see what they really are.
He has not (yet) resigned. He has announced his intention to resign. He will step down when a new leader is selected via the internal Liberal leadership race. Additionally, Parliament is prorogued until March 24 via his request of the Governor-General.
“Trudeau to resign as prime minister after Liberal leadership race”
True, but this is normal; two other Prime Ministers have taken this approach over the last 30 years, Brian Mulroney and Jean Chretien both announced their intention to resign, and then held leadership conventions to select a new party leader before actually resigning.
I was clarifying since the original headline (‘Trudeau resigns’) would be misleading to many and especially to an international audience with different types of leadership (eg a president)
- especially since the original source for this was the British broadcaster. While it’s not the norm, he would still have the ability to resign immediately and have someone act in the interim (unless I’m mistaken) until the new leader is selected or force a new election.
(The new link and headline are now accurate and reflect the actual situation.)
Since Trudeau has been elected the likelihood of purchasing a home or finding a job has drastically reduced and continues to fall. Rising tides raise all boats, given that the rent has risen everywhere too.
This creates a divide between the have and have-nots of property ownership and public or private employment. This divides ends in the individuals who have are happy since their investment skyrocketed while the have-nots are left with no hope for their future.
As for employment, the primary job growth is in public sector (government jobs) which are ultimately a parasitic value add to the economy.
Given this, it's easy to see the negative sentiment in Trudeau and his cabinet. This sentiment seems to have hit a crescendo with the recent release of the over-shot budget deficit.
This is almost identical to the US economy, we have decent job growth... until you remove government jobs. It's really insidious how the current setup kills small businesses and drives everyone to government work, if this trend continues will the government just slowly consume everything?
Washington D.C. now is only behind SF and Seattle in average income. If you want money you either work for a sector that is booming or the government.
Hm, I'm unfamiliar with the public:private job ratio in the US. I'd imagine other industries bolster the US more (tech being an obvious one)? Whereas in Canada our biggest industries have dwindled and we typically lose our knowledge-based workers to you gosh darn freedom lovers!
Speaking as US citizen, what policies/legislation could Trudeau have reasonably enacted to alleviate the housing/job market? It's been pretty rough stateside as far as real estate goes, but it doesn't seem like a solution will materialize (that is to say, there's no solution that avoids hurting the wallets of the people in charge).
I'm no economist by any means but most armchair experts I interact tend to believe that this drive in pricing comes from low yield government spending, increased immigration and of course lower rate of residences being built.
IMO, altering immigration levels would have the most tangible affect on the housing and jobs (unsure about the US). I'm not bullish on the idea that we can build residences quickly and the government spending is hard to control with poor financial auditing among the current administration.
One of my big issues with J.T. is his massive waste of money on gun control. The vast majority of guns used in crimes in Canada are illegal guns from the US, with most being hand guns.
The Liberals under J.T. has proposed a ban on assault style weapons (not assault weapons, mind you which are already banned) that so far has cost over $70M without guns being collected. The estimate cost is over $800M to collect them.
The last time we had a gun control fantasy was also under the Liberals. They proposed a long gun registry that they estimated would cost $2M a year. By the time it was cancelled 20 years later, the total cost was over $2B.
This is one area leftists and right wingers can agree on -- gun control doesn't work, it punishes minority communities, it targets the wrong things, and it's written in ways that aren't backed by data.
Leftists want to be armed for community defense (and because Marx and other leftist writers wrote about the importance of being armed).
That said, if I show up at the range with a pride flag on my rifle people lose their shit about it, so I guess we have a ways to go before we've got left-right solidarity there.
I forgot to mention, but the 'assault style weapons' are legal currently. All of the owners have proper licenses, have background checks, and are registered with the government.
I hadn't heard that this was likely to happen. Any Canadians here able to weigh on whether this was expected or is a normal procedure for your elected officials?
Generally, governments in Canada are voted out in roughly 9-year intervals. Trudeau took office in 2015, so nothing unusual there. Moreover, Trudeau is exiting with approval ratings just a percent below his predecessor, Stephen Harper (22% vs. 23%, respectively). So, in a wider sense, this is not so unusual. But we're facing a trade war with the States and less-than-joking threats of annexation, so it's a bad moment to have our leadership in a shakeup.
This is the crux of the issue honestly. Trudeau should have had the humility to read the writing on the wall in the fall, and stepped down so we could have a stable government to deal with the incoming US administration and give his party a fighting chance next election.
He could have rested on his laurels knowing history would likely forget his shortcomings & scandals, and be remembered as the prime minister who got us legal weed, navigated the covid pandemic, brought clean drinking water to FN reserves and advanced social programs (childcare, dental care).
Instead he's likely going to be known as the prime minister who had to be forcibly walked to the door by Canadians and his party, while leaving the country in a precarious position during tumultuous times.
Here's the primary problem with your argument: the current front-runner to win the next election is the Conservative Party of Canada, with Pierre Poilievre as leader, and pretty much a shoo-in for the next Prime Minister.
Poilievre is a career politician who's only professional experience has been as a politician, has no work history to speak of (don't take my word for it, his wikipedia entry details only a job as a collection agent, and that he started a business in 2003 focused on political communications, and then was elected in 2004).
Poilievre has spent the last several years in the lead up to becoming the party leader for the CPC cozying up to the alt-right, supporting the anti-vax movement, and hasn't published any meaningful policy documentation.
Poilievre is basically the last man standing from Stephen Harpers administration (in terms of policies and practices), and has failed to drive or pass any meaningful legislation or policy changes in his 20 year career. His victory in the 2022 CPC leadership campaign was a landslide, but also suffered from allegations of foreign interference from India and China. There is still an outstanding report on foreign interference due on January 31st.
Trudeau's greatest mistake was not implementing the electoral change he campaigned on, which likely would have marked a long term shift toward more left leaning social policies along side centrist fiscal policies, which have typically characterized Canadian society. Unfortunately, unless a very compelling alternative to the CPC emerges in the next 3 months, we will most likely get a government lead by a sock-puppet who lacks any real strength to negotiate with a presumably hostile incoming US administration, and the official party line from other Conservative groups in Canada appears to be appeasement and concession.
> Trudeau's greatest mistake was not implementing the electoral change he campaigned on
Agreed. In an over-simplification,
- first past the post is the best for the Conservatives. (It was best for the Liberals before the Reform & Conservatives merged).
- single transferable is the best for the Liberals
- mixed-member proportional is the best for the NDP
Trudeau thought the electoral commission would give him the STV he wanted, but it was going to deliver MMP that would pretty much guarantee that he would have to coalition with the NDP. So he nixed it. He ended up with an NDP coalition anyways, so he didn't gain anything through the nixing. Instead FPTP is going to result in a Conservative landslide in 2025.
I wish you and others had just considered the NDP platform which has always supported electoral reform (MMP) and cannabis legalization. Two planks the Liberals "stole" in order to win (and one which they then promptly threw away).
Mulcair was ahead in the polls first half of that election. Trudeau came out of third place to win with his lie about electoral reform and by refusing to answer the question about the religious discrimination laws being introduced in Quebec.
Things could have gone very differently. Mulcair was a much more competent politician than Trudeau, and the NDP platform was more balanced. Though it may have been a challenge for him to assemble a fully competent cabinet.
Look at the NDP party this last term for their true colors. A leader who in his own words votes against a no-confidence vote made up of his very own words. Is an equal partner in every decision the liberal government made this term with their coalition.
A wolf in sheep disguise. I didn't want PP to be the next prime minister for comments in parent of the thread, but who else is going to win this running now?
I guess I'm not sure how you can fully square the two statements here.
- You don't want PP to be PM
- You're angry at the NDP for not voting to bring Trudeau down (and effectively make PP the PM)
I share your frustration with the NDP under Singh. But I'm not sure what alternative he has, tactically. Voting down the government at this juncture would only have led to an election that would have brought PP to power as PM. Which is notably not in the NDP's interests. (Or, I'd argue, the public's)
But, yes, I understand it tactically. But it's strategically inept. For 4 years the NDP has "won the battle but lost the war" -- all the policy planks they forced the Liberals to adopt will simply be dismantled by the conservatives now.
What they were hoping for is some recognition from the public that the progressive moves made by the Liberals in the last parliament were in fact NDP initiatives forced on them. Instead they're just tarred and feathered with the same image that Trudeau has.
Justin Trudeau was a ski instructor before becoming Prime Minister.
Ronald Reagan and Zelenskyy were ridiculed as an actor in their election campaigns.
Poilievre is a career politician and unproven at the highest office, but that by itself should not disqualify him. Knowing who to delegate to is 90% the job of a good leader -- the other 10% is public speaking and being charismatic.
Sure, Trudeau was a ski instructor. You will also note that I neglected to mention that Poilievre had a paper route; that's because paper routes aren't professional experience.
Trudeau was also a secondary school teacher, acted in a tv movie. He also reputedly worked as a bouncer and worked in various (heavily politically affiliated) non-profits. He had a career before politics.
That said, my primary point is that Poilievre hasn't been a particularly effective politician, and his reputation is largely that of a blowhard who's main appeal is that he is not Trudeau.
Neither Freeland nor Carney want to be the next Kim Campbell. The Liberals are going to lose the next election badly whether or not Trudeau is leading it. I'm sure that Trudeau made the decision to step down ~6 months ago and is now just playing with the timing to maximum effect. Stepping down now basically pushes the election three months further out than it would otherwise be due to a prorogation to pick a new leader. That gives Pollievre 3 more months worth of rope and Trump time to sabotage Pollievre.
Yeah my expectation is this next leadership campaign will be half-assed and "fought" by people who know they will never be PM. Instead they'll expect 4-5 years of PP and somewhere in the middle another leadership campaign that they'll then try to win.
I do think Freeland is too tainted by Trudeau now to be a success. Very intelligent woman, but I think her political career is ending. (I should check back on this comment in 5 years)
I agree she's tainted which makes her a bad choice to be his successor. But people have short memories and I think in 3-4 years the Trudeau stains will have washed off. In that time she'll have a chance to make a name for herself.
I think if she wanted she could very well be a contender in the next election cycle.
Trudeau should have resigned after getting a second minority government. I mean, actually he should not have run that election at all. But in general in our history, failure to get a majority can be forgiven once... but twice? The knives come out.
I'm amazed at the dominance he has over his party that has made it possible for him still to be hanging on. Even his resignation is slow motion.
This is an interesting statement in that, sadly, the person making the threats is not joking yet to those that have not drunk the kool-aid it is an utter joke of a concept.
the president is biden, and biden has not made such jokes. the president elect has made them, but he is not currently commander-in-chief. he may atop making those jokes once he has power
I like the use of technically here leaving the hint that some might not go along with those orders even if the technical commander did give them. This is more chilling with Kelly's revelations of Trump's desire to have a specific type of general
You mean both chambers that are now in control by his party?
Also, a president doesn't have to declare war to engage in military conflict.
"For the United States, Article One, Section Eight of the Constitution says "Congress shall have power to ... declare War." However, that passage provides no specific format for what form legislation must have in order to be considered a "declaration of war" nor does the Constitution itself use this term. In the courts, the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, in Doe v. Bush, said: "[T]he text of the October Resolution itself spells out justifications for a war and frames itself as an 'authorization' of such a war."[2] in effect saying an authorization suffices for declaration and what some may view as a formal congressional "Declaration of War" was not required by the Constitution. "
...unless they decide to just have Pentagon lawyers print up a lot of paper that says whatever they're doing falls under existing authorizations that consistently get renewed without debate.
Right, but even if the US actually wants to annex Canada, Canada would have to allow that to happen. That's what makes it insane. Russia wanted to annex Ukraine, and it didn't go so well. So playing the tape to the end, what do people think Trump is actually proposing? A war? A "special operation"?
A whole group of countries joined together and came to the aid of Kuwait when Iraq attempted to annex them.
Edit: are you suggesting that Europe would not come to the aid of Canada just because it's Canada or because they would be going against the US? The rest of the world could turn around and isolate the US with sanctions and tariffs at a minimum. Would that be worth it for the US?
Well... if we're living in a imaginary/video game world where US invades Canada it wouldn't be too far fetched to expect Britain and France to intervene? I mean which is more absurd?
Who in their right mind would not? If im the leader of a European country, and I see the US go rogue and annex their closest neighbour and longest ally, thats a clear message that the US can not be trusted.
Sure, but in that case you might be more preoccupied with securing your own position rather than risking intervention on a continent you have no foothold in.
Securing your own position is contingent on having a proper deterrence to US invasion or belligerence. Unless you are thinking of appeasing them, but I doubt that European defense minds would consider that.
You realize most European armies have tons of US equipment right? They are barely able to hold back Russia, with US help. Now they're supposed to build up their domestic DIB, hold off Russia, and fight a war on unfamiliar territory?
I doubt they'd adopt outright appeasement, but they would be walking very cautiously.
I do realize that. The war in Ukraine is not being supported by Nato. They are sending supplies but the alliance is not entering Ukraine against Russia so as to not create a wider conflict. Note that Ukraine is not a NATO signatory while Canada is.
In the case of the US annexing Canada,the strategic analysis would give two options. Either immediately oppose US aggression and form a bloc independent of them, or tacitly approve of it and leave yourself open to the same thing happening to you and your neighbours.
Sending munitions/equipment to one side means that you support that side ;)
I do not know what kind of mental gymnastics you make when you say NATO doesn't support the war in Ukraine, but it actually does - with the NATO SG going to Ukraine in a show of support.
AFAIK, there is no precedent to what will happen if a NATO country attacks another NATO country - we came close to that when the Turks and the Greeks almost started fighting a few years back.
Even more equipment if they force US troops to abandon their posts and their equipment as they are all now PNG from whatever country we have foreign bases.
Any country or group with a grievance. It would be open season. Lots of soft targets in the US that could give people pause in their support for Operation Canadian Bacon
The King of Canada would probably want to defend his people regardless of the cost.
The British Armed Forces swear an oath of allegiance to the King not the British government.
If he says go, they go.
It would be a gamble for even Trump that Britain can't launch nukes to defend a Commonwealth ally (obviously that would probably be the end of the UK but we've faced that before, eh).
> It would be a gamble for even Trump that Britain can't launch nukes to defend a Commonwealth ally (obviously that would probably be the end of the UK but we've faced that before, eh)
As I initially asked: would you be willing to end your own country just because you feel like you need to defend another country on another continent against an adversary you have no chance of beating?
The entire point of NATO and other treaties is that every signatory is willing to risk their country to protect the other signatories. It makes the game theory choice to attack stupid.
But it’s all academic anyways. The US military would eagerly lead a coup before willingly attacking the UK or Canada, particularly if non-conventional means are threatened.
Consider that nearly every officer has done several war games or exercises alongside UK or Canadian officers. This is true both of NCOs and senior leadership. Being friendly with their armed forces is institutional. It would be easier to convince the Marines to attack the Army than to convince them to attack their Canadian counterparts.
Armed forces are friendly to who they are being ordered to be friendly. And they don't have a an issue with any other armed forces unless being ordered to have an issue.
Me personally? Doesn't matter what I'd do. I'm just some gobshite on the internet.
In this hypothetical situation the opinions that matter are those of the men in the subs that have just seen their family and friends wiped out.
They've got roughly 120 active warheads to play with and realistically no one is going to stop them all.
So if you add up the damage from that plus the loss of a major trading partner and military ally it kind of seems unlikely to be a profitable venture for anyone involved.
If the US were in this position, any country that had sanctions that were only there at the urging from the US would be dropped. Even if they were not dropped, those that were sanctioned would immediately start ignoring them. Hell, most of Europe would probably immediately starting buying oil/gas from Russia.
I dont think there would be a military intervention, and if there were, I dont think it would be verry successful. NATO would be crippled without the US.
They could invoke Article 5 of NATO; that would trigger Article 8;, expelling USA from NATO and requiring all remaining member to come to Canada's aid.
>In the case of any contradiction with other international obligations (with the exception of the United Nations, which by Article 7 supersedes NATO), or in military conflict of two NATO members, Article 8 comes into force. This is most important in cases should one member engage in military action against another member, upon which the offending members would be held in abeyance of the treaty and thereby NATO protection as a whole.
Words on a page don't put boots on the ground. The treaty would be invoked, US would be expelled (and sanctioned), and nobody would dare try to break the blockade.
The only meaningful resistance would come from within the US military, or maybe China would finally venture out of their sphere of influence (although it's more likely they'll use the opportunity to pursue more regional concentration of power).
Even if they achieve it, the reputational damage would be hard to understate. I think anyone with a bone to pick with the States would happily and repeatedly point to us Canadians as an example of what happens when you trust Americans. And that would be enough to achieve a lot of their regional policy goals, if not much more. Mexico would probably seek other political partners to make sure they're not next.
These are good points, but I have to comment that all of these suggest the physical resistance to an annexation would come from domestic actors rather than international.
If Poilievre gets elected, will he willingly join the USA? It seems that the world is more and more aligned by political spectrum rather than national allegiance.
I think the Overton window has become much easier to slide around with social media influence campaigns. If someone powerful wants something -- even if it's against everyone else's interests -- it's now much easier for them to drum up popular support for it through underhanded tactics. Remember that Brexit started as a joke.
Did it? Stickers or posters saying "keep our Pound!" were common on bus stops and street lights as a kid in the Home Counties in the 90s. Newspapers ran (mostly untrue) stories about market fruit stands needing to sell bananas by the KG rather than by the lb. Both the Tories and Labour had Euroskeptic wings since the 1970s.
Rightly or wrongly, the undercurrent of Brexit was there from the start of the EU and ebbed or flowed based on events of the day.
That's a great point; I'm glad you added that context and I'll take back that characterisation. I was mostly speaking through the lens of Farage's antics, and lacked the viewpoint of someone from the UK proper.
Everyone gets manipulated one way or another. It’s up to the person to carry the weight and responsibility of their actions.
When it comes to US - Canada relations, if Canadians decide to be a part of the states, then it’s their will. I don’t support it, but if super majority changes their minds… well, we live in a democracy, and such is the will of people.
Frankly, I think US is in a panic mode as they realize they can’t outcompete China anytime soon by themselves. So they’re trying every possible thing to see what sticks to increase their chances.
China is also in panic mode because of internal issues that stem from the younger generation’s dissatisfaction. Natural fix is to claim some wins to rally and unite people. So the ideas of reunification, playing to win in manufacturing, showing how much better they can overcome the economical problems using their 1B population are on the play now.
For whatever reason, I think the common lives of people who live in countries that play for both sides will be the only ones that get elevated. And frankly, I think, Canada should do the same.
This is my analysis too. Trump is all about brinkmanship. Scare everyone else and bring them to the edge of the precipice that you know they dont want to go over. Then extract concessions. Its desperation, not sustainable, but it works as long as you have the upper hand.
Agreed, it definitely works. But given the absolute numbers of population in other countries, I’m not sure how long it can last. Alienate the allies, make them get together, and join the competitor, as you’re being very unreliable.
I think he understands quite a bit. People on his team are very far from being stupid. They’re all playing the “populist game in the streets” to garner support, but it doesn’t seem like they have a strategy laid out to confront the upcoming problems.
If this is true and Canada has not arrested O’Leary then they’ve already shown how weak they are to naked sedition and it’s only a matter of time before something terrible happens.
As far as I'm aware we have no laws about going and making a moron out of yourself advocating for giving the country away. Nor do I particularly think we need any, morons can be morons, the rest of us can ignore them (and I say this as someone strongly against the idea of joining the states).
Naked sedition would be promoting an actual invasion, not just floating the idea of Canada joining as the 51st state voluntarily and figuring out the logistics of how that could happen (which as far as I can tell is all this is).
We don't have an equivalent of the American Logan Act that would make this illegal.
I don't think there's any need to arrest anyone as a show of strength. I don't feel the threat of an actual American invasion and I like living in a free society that doesn't go around arresting people for political show. Most of us are offended by Kevin being a self appointed negotiator on behalf of Canada but it's not like government is bound by anything he says so if he wants to talk in private with Trump as a private citizen so be it.
I feel like a single word should explain it, but I know HN abhors single word responses. Trump has threatened tariffs and has mentioned annexing Canada. He's also mentioned buying Greenland, trading Puerto Rico for Greenland, and a bunch of other notions.
It seems to me that he really wants to do some empire building, but hasn't figured out a way that people would actually accept (and isn't interested in the modern version of treaty based "empires").
To me, the canal thing is the only thing he's mentioned that is possible. There's a stipulation that does allow for that, just like there's a stipulation that the crown can do away with parliament in the UK. Doesn't mean it's an unlikely provision to be invoked without a lot of negative baggage to the point they are not likely to happen.
In fairness, the US paid for the Panama Canal and have continued to sustain it despite no "ownership".
Panama is only relevant because of the US investment in the Canal and they claim ownership when it suits them and then cry poverty every time investments need to be made.
Panama is currently playing with fire by courting foreign interest that doesn't align with the US, who are effectively their paymasters.
It's not a sudden "empire-building" move by the US. The fact that the canal exists at all has always been because of the US Empire. Panama is playing a dangerous game of FA&FO.
You can replace Panama with Ukraine, or Taiwan. The double standard is getting out of control. Respect for Trump for laying it as it is without all the BS.
Greenland actually makes a lot of sense. I think if every citizen there was offered $5million they’d vote yes. And it’s entirely reasonable from the USA perspective as it’s not that much overall for the US.
Probably wouldn’t make a state but treat like Puerto Rico where they continue to self govern and citizens can freely move to the USA as they’d have USA passports.
For USA very strategic naval passages and mineral extraction.
It’s not that crazy really and I think there’s a deal that’s mutually beneficial where everyone wins and is better off long term.
Normal people would try to negotiate trade relations. Megalomaniacs would decide to just take something even if they try to soften the taking with money.
> I think if every citizen there was offered $5million they’d vote yes. And it’s entirely reasonable from the USA perspective as it’s not that much overall for the US.
More than made up for in 'savings' from killing off Medicare. But realistically, you don't really need to balance a budget sheet when you can just print more of that principle currency on demand.
Particularly look at the projected Liberal seat count.
This gov was propped up by a supply agreement with the NDP in order to maintain parlimentary confidence. The NDP leader becomes eligible for a generous pension scheme if he stays an MP to some point in February. As such the timing for all this is no coincidence, and people have been expecting this for a while, but it is shocking just how shamelessly self serving it all is.
As others have said, this came after historically significant low popularity and mounting political pressures. His government faced criticism over falling poll numbers, by-election losses, and a broken agreement with the NDP. Tensions with the US and internal dissent within the Liberal party added to his challenges.
One of the final nails in the coffin was the resignation of Chrystia Freeland, his last standing ally and Finance Minister.
At earliest, May 5th (March 24th parliament comes back, instantly votes no confidence, governor general issues writ the same day, the shortest possible campaign period is 37 days and election day must fall on a Monday).
At latest, Oct 27th (regularly scheduled election is Oct 20th, but that might be delayed by 7 days due to scheduling conflicts - see Bill C-65).
Likely somewhere in between there. All the opposition parties have been signalling that they intend to vote no confidence. Assuming that doesn't change though, there's likely at least a few days lag between parliament coming back, and that happening. The campaign period is likely not to be as short as possible (with an allowable range of 37 to 51 days).
Yes. It's pretty normal in the Westminster system and more generally in Parliamentary systems.
Was it expected? Eh - kind of. In the last few weeks much of Trudeau's cabinet has resigned or voiced their disapproval. NDP has signaled they would support bringing down the government.
Its been expected since before the Christmas break. There was a cabinet reshuffle, and its come out he's lost the support of his finance minister Chrystia Freeland, wasn't able to replace her with Marc Carney his top choice as Carney seems to be distancing himself from the current Govt on top of public support being at an all time low.
Both the opposition Conservatives and the supporting NDP parties (NDP in particular was holding up the Liberal Minority Govt) have been planning non-confidence motions this month that would result in a new election.
There was no path to victory for Trudeau after that, so the next best move is to resign and hope the liberals can pick a new leader before the next electoral cycle is too far along and avoid the issue the Democrats had by rushing to select a replacement candidate and alienating some portion of voters by doing so.
Yup, I hear the top candidates to replace him are Chrystia Freeland or Marc Carney (maybe known to this community since he's on Stripe's board). These top candidates might not accept to play this round though as the chances of winning are slim in the current circumstances. Some people are calling the next leader of the party a "sacrificial lamb".
Its very possible the next candidate inherits the overall sentiment and is indeed a 'sacrificial lamb'. The anti-Trudeau sentiment is high, but if he steps back its an open question if the left wing/ABC crowd and centrists revisit their support for the liberal party.
IMO Chrystia Freeland would be a great pick for the country. She was firm and capable during the NAFTA/USMCA renegotiations, and seems to have stood up against political games from the current administration to her eventual detriment of losing her cabinet position.
Marc Carney certainly has appeal, but I can't help but see him as Ignatief 2.0 and that didn't go well with many Canadians.
Then again I'm on the fence on Freeland, as are most of my circle as anecdotal as that is. Our issues with Trudeau don't completely extend to her, and if she differentiates herself well enough along a few lines she might get more support than traditionally expected from a Trudeau cabinet member.
Or maybe that's wishful thinking. Our alternatives haven't done much in the way of proposing a viable alternative path and have focused almost explicitly on criticizing Trudeau and the parties actions. Its appealing to the "fuck trudeau" flag flyers but I do wonder if centrists will find the CPC appealing without a change in direction and messaging now Trudeau is leaving.
All the Canadians that I talk to (including some CBC news employees) have been insistent that this was an eventuality and also that he would drag it out to do it as embarrassingly as possible.
This was definitely expected, people within and outside of the party have been calling for Trudeau to resign for a while and that chorus has been getting louder and picking up more prominent figures.
I suppose standard procedure in a Westminster parliament is to have a non confidence vote and an election - which is what the opposition parties said would happen when Parliament sits again. Poroguing parliament and having a leadership race is probably a way to try and avoid that or at least go into the election with a less unpopular leader.
Proguing parliament is probably the best thing for the liberal party to avoid an election with an unpopular leader. But I don't think it's good for Canada as it states down Trump's tariffs
There is no term limit for PM or members of parliament.
They stay on until they lose the support of their party.
He lost the support of his party due to his extreme unpopularity and the impact it will have on the future election. As seen by polls and bye elections.
More often the leader loses party support after an election loss.
However in this case, a loss is so likely and expected to be so bad that his party would rather go to the polls with a different leader.
Canadian here. It's certainly not normal. News broke yesterday that this was coming. The opposition kept tabling no confidence votes and trying to get an early election called... and Trudeau's approval rating is so low that it might even be the lowest of any Prime Minister in history (though I don't know so if someone does by all means fact check that).
However, our upcoming election is this year. It certainly does not surprise me that Trudeau is stepping down from leader of the Liberal party in light of the polling, since the polls are predicting that if an election were called today, the conservatives would win in such a landslide that I don't think many countries have even seen that before. Of course polling and actual election results are two very different things... but I think the Liberal party sees the writing on the wall. If they hope to have any shot of getting re-elected, they can't do it with Trudeau at the head.
... but that doesn't necessarily mean that we all saw him resigning as PM incumbent coming. He's also proroguing parliament until March. This is probably a move to get the other parties to step back and "STFU"; to not pass any motions during the party shift (particularly related to calling an early election etc).
Lastly, as others have said, the PM position is usually held for an average of 9-10 years (and that's multiple terms .. most incumbents just get re-elected into second and third terms). Trudeau was elected in 2015 so he's about due to exit anyway if we go by averages (though some have served longer).
1% below Stephen Harper, which is bad, but not unprecedented bad.
I think if the liberals can delay the election until October, their results won't be so bad, especially if Trump keeps saying dumb things down in America (as he is prone to do), making alignment with the conservatives less popular (they will still win, just not the huge landslide that they can take now).
The approval rating seems like an unhelpful metric here if the actual resulting election is such a landslide.
Also I think there is a bit of a different here between Harpers Conservatives and Tredeaus Liberals.
In 2015 people were actually really excited and hopeful about Justin Trudeau (sounds weird to say but it is true). He was voted in "positively" based on legalizing cannabis & election reform.
2025 is a very different spot, Pollieve is not a particularly popular politician. The singular reason they will win in a land slide is that people HATE Trudeau in a way I haven't seen in my life.
The liberals really should take a long hard look at themselves and re-evaluate. On a more local level the Ontario Liberals actually just collapsed a while ago and haven't even been relevant in politics ever since.
(slightly off topic: I have no idea why tf my comment got down-voted. I'm not even expressing any personal opinions about Trudeau or politics. I'm just answering the question as factually as I can from the point of view of a Canadian who is observing what is going on.. I have data and sources for everything I said .. including how low Trudeau's approval rating is as well as the polling... the only thing I wasn't sure of is how his rating compares to that of previous PMs. Thing is, I even know people who have voted Liberal their entire lives, and plan to in the upcoming election regardless of who the leader is, and even they can't shut up about how much they despise him. So regardless of your partisan affiliation, I don't think I even said anything that most Canadians would find the least bit controversial).
Prorogued means parliament will not meet, and so cannot hold any votes. Right now it is purely being used to prevent such a vote since there is a majority in parliament that would now vote against the government in such a situation, which in turn provokes an election.
During his delusional ramblings (and that is no exaggeration) Trudeau said that the GG was persuaded to prorogue to the 25th March because of the no confidence vote held back in December which he survived because the NDP supported him. The NDP no longer will support the Trudeau gov (announced in writing about 10 days after the last vote), coincidentally just as their leader qualifies for a nice parliamentary pension scheme.
The whole thing is a horrible exercise in the worst stereotypes of champagne socialism.
Tying NDP support to their leader's pension is silly/lazy.
As part of their deal with the Liberals, the NDP had some real power to implement legislation. If an election happened tomorrow the NDP would lose that power.
Unhitching from Trudeau at this moment is a good move for the NDP, they want to distance themselves from Trudeau's unpopularity before the next election. That Trudeau is now leaving benefits them even more, they could conceivably continue to support the government now that it's missing its most unpopular member, or they could pull the plug right away if they think they can steal away some Liberal votes during a snap election
> Tying NDP support to their leader's pension is silly/lazy.
It really isn't - the alternative is it's the most unbelievable happy coincidence.
You have to wonder how blatant the personal moneygrabbing by Lib and NDP leaders has to be before their respective support bases actually accept what is going on in their faces. Those leaders see the parties purely as a way to secure power to use to gain personal wealth at the expense of the populous.
> the alternative is it's the most unbelievable happy coincidence
It's not though.The NDP were faced with two choices:
1) Support the Liberals and get some of their policies pushed through
2) Support the Conservatives wish to call an early election in which the Conservative are sure to win a majority leaving the NDP powerless
The reason why the NDP choose this moment to pull their support is that it's an election year, so there's little chance any more NDP policy would be passed. One person's pension (a relatively wealthy person at that) is just a fun partisan talking point for Conservatives.
>I hadn't heard that this was likely to happen. Any Canadians here able to weigh on whether this was expected or is a normal procedure for your elected officials?
For many months liberal backbenchers have been calling for him to resign. Though obviously not 'likely to happen'
Only weeks ago(mid december) Trudeau refused his own caucus' call to resign. Saying he was staying on to fight for Canadians. Freeland quit with a flaming public letter and he still said he's staying in the game.
Didnt really do much, it took weeks more before he finally resigned yesterday. Despite this, still no resignation. Now parliament has been mostly suspended due to the liberal's failure to submit documents. A significant scandal.
The reason his caucus is upset is because the vast majority of them will lose in the next election. Polling suggesting they hold onto ~20 seats in an Ignatief level of fail. Resignation will still be quite unlikely. From a strategic point of view, taking the L election night and then letting a new liberal leader rebuild their reputation over 4 years is the right move.
You'll now have a leadership race where nobody wants the career ending job. The rats that try to fight for it just want their name as prime minister.
Yet here he finally resigned. Change Control dictates it was the gun ban.
The polls post-gun ban put the liberals in single digit seats. It was over for him. The gun ban ended Trudeau.
Yeah, he pretty much had no choice. Most of his party had given him the ultimatum. This has happened a bunch of times outside of the Trudeau Harper Chrétien eras, it’s normal.
Can you please add this to your pinned top comment? This was incredibly hard to find as a comment, and a BBC bearing is actually pretty important to this topic.
A friend of mine recently finished his engineering PhD at the University of Toronto. He received employment offers from an American firm and a Canadian firm. The Canadian firm offered a total compensation package worth 80,000 CAD (~55,000 USD); the American firm offered him nearly 275,000 USD.
We do, broadly, have a problem in Canada with people blaming the federal govt for things that are not under its jurisdiction. We have a very federal system, and the provinces have a lot of power.
But in this case, yes, I think federal policy is directly implicated.
In this case, it's definitely Trudeau's administration fault by flooding the Canadian job market with immigrants, which lowers job compensation and increasing housing cost.
They've always been lower, but it was always 20%ish lower. Now it's like 50%.
And in the meantime, housing prices have gone up exponentially. Housing in greater Toronto is more expensive than the Bay Area, but the compensation is far far lower.
I'm not one to blame Trudeau personally, or even immigration per se. I think there's a multitude of factors. But it's best not to deny the situation, which is that in the last few years there's been... problems... in the Canadian SWE labour market.
It's not the quantity / size of pie. It's the fact that the Canadian labour market has explicit "escape valves" for "skilled labour is too expensive" built in as a policy plank in the form of the LMIA and TFW process.
They are tools that "industry" lobbied for expansion of, and got. Have persisted through both Conservative and Liberal governments for decades, but was expanded markedly under both Harper and (especially) Trudeau.
I hate the F Trudeau crowd almost as much as I hate Trudeau, but
Low compensation ranges here are in fact in part the fault of fed gov't policy. Industry freaked out about "labour shortage" and the government responded.
The database of LMIA (Labour Market Impact Assessment) applications is public. You can see for yourself how many thousands of software engineering jobs were filled this way. (Including by big "elite" tech companies like Apple, Google, Amazon, etc.) This was deliberate policy to bring in foreign talent from India, China, etc. in order to fill a "shortage" of us, which well, that shortage was less about "can't find someone" as "I can't find someone cheap enough."
In this case I don't actually blame Trudeau or the libs -- they're on the whole too stupid about our sector to understand that in fact these low compensation ranges harm our industry more than they help. I blame corporate interests who have the ear of the gov't and misled them into thinking that somehow this would make Canada "competitive" in information tech.
All it does is force good talent to leave the country, and encourage sweat shops to open up offering mediocre "IT" services.
We're subsidizing our own Canadian students to go through great schools like U Waterloo, etc. and then losing most of them the moment they graduate, as they go to the US on a TN1. And in exchange...
I've been in this industry long enough (25 years) to have seen things go up and down relative to the US a few times. This is the worst it's ever been. Especially because you can no longer make the argument that "I may get paid less but it costs less to live here" -- that ship sailed 10 years ago.
It has since been heavily upvoted. The thing to do in such cases (i.e. when you notice an unfairly downvoted comment) is give it a corrective upvote and move on.
> makes it sound like you think my vote is the correct one that will right the previous wrong the bozo downvoter.
Well yes, except for the definite article. Any upvote counteracts any downvote. If a downvote was bad then an upvote can be corrective by neutralizing its badness. I thought that was obvious, so it's interesting that you don't.
> people who somehow hate Canadians or who find the concept amusing
There's also a boring explanation for some otherwise weird downvotes: misclicks.
PG covered this point way back at the start of HN: Empty comments can be ok if they're positive. There's nothing wrong with submitting a comment saying just "Thanks." What we especially discourage are comments that are empty and negative—comments that are mere name-calling.
I appreciate that this is a popular sentiment in certain media/online circles (i.e. Bluesky) but I don't believe it is at all an accurate statement from a policy standpoint, nor a rhetorical one.
To try to expand on this in a constructive way, I think the similarities are that they both pretend to be outsiders while being very connected and powerful and have a worrying amount of disrespectful and vindictive rhetoric and a refusal to engage with the media/intentionally egging on of rage towards the media. That's kind of where it ends though, since I don't think Poilievre has Trump's trademark complete lack of self awareness (I'm not trying to be insulting here, I think it gets him pretty far honestly and has lead to some of his funnier tweets, though I'm not a fan.).
Poilievre seems more like a traditional politician trying to ride the populist right wing train, and he's far less charismatic than Trump. Conservatives I know aren't crazy about him, if he weren't up against the even more unpopular Trudeau during the post covid global incumbent purge going on I don't think the election would be nearly as favorable. I am worried, but mostly due to the general state of the world.
Also Canada gets most of its media from the states, so right wing Canadians talk like right wing Americans with most of the same talking points. I think they'll always look similar and I can't necessarily blame Poilievre for that even if it does annoy me and he definitely intentionally rides it. It's certainly not going to end with him, and the Libs also like to pretend to be Democrats when it suits them.
We kind of did, twice, and he failed to get the message.
It has been, in the past customary for leaders of parties that fail to win a majority (after being in a minority) mandate to resign. That Trudeau a) called the last election at all and b) failed to resign after getting the same result as when they entered into it... is frustrating.
It certainly created an appearance of weakness that I suspect fed into the situation with the convoy.
Also probably tactically stupid, because he got to hold the blame for all the post-COVID problems.
Canada has a parliamentary system where the leader of the party with the most votes becomes prime Minister. So Trudeau can step down as leader of his party while remaining Prime Minister.
In this case he intends to stay on until his party selects a new Prime Minister
Technically the leader of the party with most seats gets first shot at forming government. If it is a minority parliament, another party could get a shot at forming government if the first place one fails.
One comment does not negate the other. It is traditional in most jobs to give notice before resigning. In government, it typically is the same unless for resignations. Being forcefully removed is closer to being fired/sacked with termination being much more suddenly
And even when they're forcibly removed (e.g. via a vote of no-confidence), they often keep on doing the job until a replacement is found, albeit with limited scope/powers. See France for instance recently.
There is no formal “next in line”. The closest potential successor would have been the deputy prime minister; Chrystia Freeland held that role until a few weeks ago when she dramatically resigned and sparked this chain of events.
Currently, this is “Working as Intended” in Canada’s political system.
Usually what happens when a party is not in power is that the leader will resign and an interim leader will be appointed until a new leader is elected through a leadership election. When a party is in power however, that interim leader would be an "interim Prime Minister" and is avoided because it's a lot of responsibility to give to an interim with no mandate from voters or the party.
There is no such thing as a "vice-PM" in Canada. There is no "next person in line", and parties choose leaders more or less independently of the election cycle, according to the party's needs.
The Governor General appoints a caretaker government with (ostensibly) limited powers until the party in power or the leading coalition select the next PM and create a new government.
Absolutely not. Just like every developed country, there is a continuity plan in case of issues. The deputy leader of the party in power is supposedly that person. That the Governor General then appoints that person Prime Minister is an implementation detail.
It's just that in Canada, that continuity plan is reserved for unfortunate deaths. When a PM wants to resign, they basically do what Trudeau did; they announce their party will do a leadership race while they stay on as PM.
The nuance here is that the Governor General by convention follows the advice of the PM, who establishes their continuity plan at the start of their government (IIRC it’s a standard party document and they just update the names).
It’d cause a crisis with the monarchy but they’re not legally bound to appoint the deputy. Like you said it only applies to special circumstances, I was just addressing the legal mechanism by which it happens (as the OP talked about a PM dropping dead).
In the Westminster system, being bound by tradition and being bound by law (written law that is) both have the same legal weight. Our courts can render decision on the necessity of following tradition.
I never voted for Justin Trudeau and don't like him, but despite all the angry rhetoric right now in the long term I think he will be considered by history to be one of the better Canadian PMs.
Amongst the Canadian PMs I've experienced, Chretien, Martin, Harper, Trudeau made the most impactful and positive policy changes (eg. legal cannabis, childcare) while navigating the country through the challenges of covid and Trump NAFTA renegotiations.
The negatives of his term are recent and largely tied to global issues being faced by many countries right now (eg. inflation) and so I expect future historians to hand wave these away.
My rough impression is that immigration and housing policy contributed significantly to his low approval ratings. Trudeau enacted a rather large increase in immigration a few years ago, and this caused a rather large increase in housing and food costs, with understandable economic repercussions, and changed Canadian attitudes over that time due to the related economic stress...
FYI, the "large" increase in immigration was driven by the provinces, Ontario's conservative government in particular. The provinces control the number of seats in colleges and Doug's government froze domestic tuition rates, pushing colleges to turn to international students. Now, the province also approved almost every request for international students.
The Feds can't step in sad say "no". The immigration problem is largely on the provinces. The Federal immigration numbers have grown much more slowly.
The Feds also lifted the caps for international students to work full-time hours off-campus ("temporarily" but repeatedly extended), among other things.
In what way is immigration not definitionally a federal problem? If you're referring to programs like OINP, note that
> The OINP recognizes and nominates people for permanent residence who have the skills and experience the Ontario economy needs, and the Government of Canada makes the final decision to approve applications for permanent residence.
The irony is that it was industry (especially small business) freaking out about that low unemployment rate and the pressure it was putting on wages that led to the bulk of Trudeau's demise.
They went crazy with the TFW program, LMIA, and immigration generally in order to reduce inflation. But this is not the kind of inflation that ordinary Canadians think of when we think of inflation -- grocery prices, etc. It's the inflation that business leaders freak out about: wage inflation.
And so the gov't acted, and increased the supply of skilled and unskilled labour, and here we are.
It's amusingly also the same inflation that led to Trudeau Sr. getting in a pile of trouble in the late 70s, too. In that case instead of immigration they tried the ill-fated "wage and price controls" legislation... which was... not popular.
It's almost as if raising the minimum wage is reflected as wage inflation when you're already in a condition where a large fraction of workers are near the wage floor. Adding labour supply isn't going to do anything about that unless it's biased towards higher skill.
(But honestly, I'd say a lot of these businesses deserve to fail if they can't afford to pay minimum wage workers.)
This was the cause of the panic, though. In the 2021/2022 time-frame many businesses that would normally only pay the minimum wage, give irregular hours, and treat people pretty woefully were forced to pay well above minimum wage. There was quite a bit of public anxiety from businesses about labour shortage and the result.
Please look at these numbers in depth - not how they're presenting them.
Similarly, the majority of industry growth has been Federal jobs - from Grok:
"Since Trudeau took office in 2015, the size of the federal public service has grown by approximately 43%. By March 31, 2024, the federal government's payroll included 367,772 employees, up from 257,034 in 2015."
A 43% increase in federal jobs sounds big until you realize it’s ~110,000 positions over 9 years. For this to be the ‘majority of industry growth,’ Canada would need to have added just ~200,000 jobs in total since 2015. That’s laughably off—Canada typically adds hundreds of thousands of jobs annually. For context, Canada’s employment grew by ~2.7M jobs between 2015[1] and the end of 2024[2]. Federal job growth is a drop in that bucket, not the bucket itself.
A 43% increase and the state of affairs in Canada is far worse now, including that he doubled Canada's debt to over $1.2 trillion - so now our interest payments are also huge, far less money every day going to social services because it's instead just paying interest on the debt.
There is absolutely no way he will be looked at as one of the better Canadian PMs..
By all accounts he will be looked at as one of the worst considering the position Canada was in at the start and end of his government.
Inflation, unemployment, housing, homelessness, healthcare, crime, national unity, the overall economy.
.. Just all of these things are significantly worse than 2015.
With that being said I do think cannabis + child care were both wins... but like at what cost.
Also feels like with cannabis all of society was already trending there seemed like a very easy win.
Then with childcare it is a win but it is also complicated as many daycares have unenrolled from the program because it doesn't cover enough of the cost.
It's more complicated than that. Technically healthcare is a provincial responsibility in the constitution but the feds bought their way into healthcare and regulate it through the Canada Health Act. The Feds cannot legally compel provinces to comply with the CHA but if they don't comply with it, they won't receive the federal health transfers which would essentially bankrupt the province. The province would still be getting taxed at the high federal rates, but without getting it back, to the tune of ~12% of total Provincial revenues.
Coming at it from a separate angle, it would be quite a coincidence if it just so happened that every single province in the country, over decades, has had their healthcare systems failing in basically the same way with the same problems for end users, despite having totally different geographies, economies, even languages, run by all kinds of different provincial parties across the extremes of the political spectrum. The parsimonious explanation is that there's a systematic issue in Canadian Healthcare as it's defined or operates across the country.
> The parsimonious explanation is that there's a systematic issue in Canadian Healthcare as it's defined or operates across the country.
There is! It’s because healthcare is expensive and 20th century social democracy is out of fashion. Your premier can increase expenditures by improving healthcare infrastructure, or simply kick the can down the road for the next government to deal with. Many voters don’t like taxes or debt, so the latter is an easier sell.
Occasionally, the premier can roll a 20 on persuasion and suggest that it’s the Prime Minister’s problem too.
Now, the Prime Minister could look to changing the CHA and increasing services/taxes, but it’s probably too much of a can of worms to attempt to fix in our current political climate.
"Coming at it from a separate angle, it would be quite a coincidence if it just so happened that every single province in the country, over decades, has had their healthcare systems failing in basically the same way with the same problems for end users"
It isn't though. These problems that are now being hard-felt in Toronto and Vancouver have plagued the Atlantic provinces for decades.
He increased size of Federal government by 43% since 2015 - from Grok: "By March 31, 2024, the federal government's payroll included 367,772 employees, up from 257,034 in 2015."
That's 110,738 new people on pay roll - but not that are actually productive for the economy, they are counted but are not the same as free market jobs - they're actually the opposite and a negative to the economy.
This also doesn't account for the economic harm and suffocation to local Canadians already here struggling to find work, much of the work instead going to the millions of temporary foreign workers and those on student visas.
You’re conflating separate issues here—federal employment growth, economic productivity, and temporary foreign workers (TFWs)—in an attempt to overwhelm the conversation.
First off, the claim of ‘millions of TFWs’ is pure hyperbole. TFWs currently make up around 4.1% of the workforce [1], or roughly 1.1M workers—not ‘millions.’ Ironically, if TFWs are such a large share of the workforce, the federal job increase (~110,000) seems even less significant by comparison.
And it’s odd that Grok is used to cite federal employment numbers, but you conveniently ignore its data on TFWs or international students, who are key contributors to Canada’s economy. Cherry-picking data like this only distracts from the real issues.
Otherwise you missed my points of the economic harm of TFWs displacing Canadians already here looking for work but won't accept work
The same "debate" is going on passionately in the US in regards to the H-1B program.
Otherwise I'll avoid engaging further with you since you "cherrypicked" what you read of mine, and then you try to subtly demonize/put me down by claiming "in an attempt to overwhelm the conversation."
Is Canada better today then when he started as PM? I struggle to agree that it is. Housing is as bad as it has ever been and the immigration decisions seem to have been so careless that even people that would agree with immigration as a general principal are horrified by it by and large. The Canadian dollar has collapsed VS the USD.
I guess it always ends bad if you stick around long enough.
There are many indigenous communities that now have water that are better off than before he was PM.
Speaking for myself I think things in 2019 were better than 2015. The pandemic and things after the pandemic (hi inflation and spiking interest rates) have not been quite so fun but these are global issues and people around the world have had a similar experience. Arguably there is more Trudeau could have done but some things are beyond his reach (eg. Bank of Canada sets interest rates).
If you're a person without an established home you own you probably feel things are disastrously worse than 2015 when you presumed that surely eventually you'd own one. If you already own a home you probably care quite a bit less.
Housing was deeply dysfunctionally broken in the major cities well before Trudeau became PM in 2015 and the lazy status quo approach of his government ensured that the contagion of housing shortage would spread Canada wide. It's mostly Provincial and Municipal governments that are at fault but plenty of fault for the feds too. Despite the fact that Fed housing policy right now is better than it's ever been the damage has been done.
That's the rhetoric but I'm not sure it's the reality. At least not where I live. It's a big country so ymmv. In a neighbourhood with a scam college bringing in lots of students yeah sure maybe some distortions of the market were more noticeable as rental vacancy plunged and rents increased.
In Vancouver housing prices were already going into their exponential curve in 2014 before this government was even elected or immigration numbers were fiddled with. In the last two years while immigration was increased home prices have been flat. You can have a look at BC Assessment as home values are updated every year. The biggest change comes with 2021 due to ultra low interest rates. As interest rates rose home prices stagnated as expected.
Personally I don't see any connection at all between home prices and immigration though I can imagine rental vacancy and rent prices were impacted in some places (particularly smaller town Ontario) due to the reluctance of municpalities and the province to build more homes and the prevalence of exploitative scam colleges).
The CAD is sitting at about $0.70 USD right now, which isn't really outside of it's typical range, and not really unexpected given the difference in interest rate now between Canadian & US interest rates. If you look at historical prices it looks more like business-as-usual, the CAD usually bounces between 0.70-0.80 USD.
Yes, but that was a very unusual time and can be attributed to the US financial crisis. In addition to money fleeing the US, the Canadian and US interest rates diverged to strengthen the Canadian dollar.
That's actually bad for the economy. Canadian companies benefit from the lower dollar as goods are often sold in USD, but wages are paid in CAD. 0.75 to 0.8 is the historical benchmark for the exchange rate.
This might be splitting hairs, but I think this is more about the strength of USD than the weakness of CAD. I don't know that you can say CAD has "collapsed" when every other major currency has seen a similar (or worse) drop compared to USD over the last 10 years.
After 2008 we also "benefited" from very high oil prices which drove the dollar higher
That high dollar didn't do any positive things for Ontario & Quebec's export oriented manufacturing sector though, which is why I put "benefited" in quotes.
Canada is definitely worse than it was ten years ago, but all of the major problems are provincial responsibilities: housing, health care, education, policing.
The largely conservative provinces have done a very good job of blaming Trudeau and immigration for problems that are entirely their own.
The problem with Trudeau's government is he didn't/doesn't consult with provinces very much. They continue to announce programs and initiatives that live in the territory of the provinces without provincial buy in.
If it was one or two provinces you would be correct, but when every province is facing the same issue(s), then the turd starts to stick to the feds... The immigration issue is a prime example, he announced higher than normal targets but didn't consult or work with the provinces about this, which caused many provinces to be taken by surprise and have their social systems overwhelmed by the influx of people. Many of these same systems where still recovering from covid... so yea recipe for disaster.
It seems like every other week I hear a news article about a joint announcement between BC & the federal government having to do with housing or health care. It takes 2 to co-operate.
Out of curiosity, how is the housing & health care situation in those conservative provinces compared to other provinces (like Quebec, where I live in)?
It's instructive to compare Vancouver to Toronto. 10 years ago in BC health care was in worse shape and housing was ~2X the cost of Toronto. In the past 10 years BC has had an NDP government and Ontario a Conservative one. Both housing & health care have gotten worse in BC, but at a much lower rate than in Ontario. Today health care in BC is in much better shape than Ontario, and the cost of housing in Vancouver is about the same as it is in Toronto.
Are there any numbers/data for the quality of healthcare in the provinces over time?
At least for housing I see the average home prices in each category (condos, townhomes, detached) still higher in Vancouver than Toronto (when googling a bit, I found https://wowa.ca/reports/canada-housing-market with some data. But there's probably lots of real estate related sites with more).
I moved from a liberal province to a conservative province last year. My cost of living is 25% lower, gas is much cheaper and I was able to buy a new beautiful house which was an impossibility in my previous province.
Housing, healthcare and policing being provincial responsibility is an oversimplification. Provinces are basically compelled to comply with the federal Canada Health Act under threat of being taxed for, but not receiving the huge Canada Health Transfers which account for ~12% of provincial revenues. Housing on the supply side is largely provincial, but the feds could still take a larger role. They have had a long time to think of ways to bring in more skilled labour in the construction industry rather than, say, the fast food industry. And let alone thinking ways to solve the housing crisis, the Liberals wouldn't even admit until a few months ago that the price of housing is too high and should go down.
The feds run the RCMP, they set most criminal laws and sentencing, bail policy etc. As Poilievre repeats ad naseum, the same 40 repeat offenders are arrested thousands of times in Vancouver. It doesn't matter how good a job the police do if the justice system refuses to punish them.
I don't know what are the problems we're facing in education but I don't think that is on the top of the list of why Canadians are feeling frustrated with the Liberals.
> The largely conservative provinces have done a very good job of blaming Trudeau and immigration for problems that are entirely their own.
No. Immigration reduces available housing. Immigration overloads the health care system. Immigration strains the education system. Immigration creates ethnic enclaves that are hard to police.
Immigration is a federal responsibility. Trudeau and the Liberals are to blame.
> Is Canada better today then when he started as PM?
As you've already concluded, the answer is absolutely not. The Canada I grew up with, and mind you my family are immigrants from the 90s and early 2000s ourselves, is completely shattered.
One could endlessly go on about the economy/COL, immigration, crumbling healthcare, housing crisis, far-left ideology going mainstream, etc.
But I could frame it much simpler than that - Canada, at least in cities of modest sizes and up, is rapidly transitioning from a high-trust to a low-trust society.
An anecdote: my sister is more than 10 years younger than me, she's currently attending the same university as I did over a decade ago; in the span of less than half a year, she's got 2 bikes stolen - her original bike with front wheel removed to bypass the lock in late summer 2024, then the entire lock cut to steal her replacement bike in December; this would be inconceivable to me during my time living in the same town.
Yet, apparently one will instead sidestep the discussion entirely. Frankly the more you've tried to answer the question the less you actually answer it...
I don't see how "rapidly transitioning from a high-trust to a low-trust society" or "she's got 2 bikes stolen ... this would be inconceivable to me during my time living in the same town" reflect failures in Canadian government at all, really.
Has societal trust actually increased anywhere in the developed world? Sure, our governments have had their share of failures, but it would actually take an extraordinary vision and effort to increase societal trust as technology and population advance.
Is it possible your sister had a shockingly unlucky semester? Or that your world model was simply naive and wrong 10 years ago? Hard to say since the anecdote isn't really evidence of anything.
Every store in my town now locks up anything small that costs more than $20 in cages. Talking to some people working there it was pretty common for people to walk in, take a bunch of shit, and walk out. Drivers are completely out of control. I've witnessed at least 3 people run red lights in the last 2 years, while I can remember only one such incident in the 10 years before that. Signalling is no longer something drivers do - like at all. For the last 2 years teenagers have terrorized the local park on Canada Day shooting fireworks at random passers by. With someone setting off fireworks under an occupied baby carriage last year. Car thefts in Toronto got so bad that people were building retractable bollards in their driveways[1].
I could go on, but there's a clear apparent trajectory to these experiences.
I'm kind of confused by the question. Do you think an unverified commenter on a public website saying "all the stores in my town [not named] do X [but I didn't count]" is a type of hard evidence that I'm arbitrarily rejecting?
No; I think that there's no feasible way that anyone could have hard evidence one way or another for the underlying question, and that you should therefore take anecdotes more seriously.
>Has societal trust actually increased anywhere in the developed world? Sure, our governments have had their share of failures, but it would actually take an extraordinary vision and effort to increase societal trust as technology and population advance.
Japan. Again, depending on where in the country, but things like muggings and drunk driving have drastically decreased in the last 35 years.
If you know you know, and clearly plenty of people who read my original comment do.
Judging from your other comments, you're either wilfully ignorant or actively dishonest, can't tell which, and frankly don't care either way. All I know is it'd be a complete waste of time to try to convince you.
> you're either wilfully ignorant or actively dishonest
I think "willful ignorance" is a good description of accepting impossible-to-verify anecdotes of internet comments as evidence of societal change, personally. But I'm realizing we don't have the same goals in the conversation so I understand why it feels pointless to continue.
> economy, healthcare costs, housing crisis, and... far left ideology
One of these things is not like the others. Could you elaborate on how 'far left ideology' relates to the others in terms of the supposed fall of our country?
Whenever I see people using the term "far left", I realize its meaning has been subverted and neutered to mean something else entirely. Same with "woke". It's very Orwellian to see how successfully these words have been distorted to obscure their nature and power.
I think people are talking past each other. Some of these parties are "far left" on social issues while simultaneously being "moderate right" on economic issues. So you can label these parties either way, depending on what's convenient to your argument.
For context, the liberal party is right of centre these days. We don't even have a "far-left" party. The NDP is solidly left, probably slightly left of what the liberals were years ago when this poster thinks things were wonderful.
We do have fringe parties that are far-left, that basically get a handful of votes a year, and we have one far-right party, the People Party of Canada, that gets enough votes to occasionally get some news coverage.
I think any Canadian that identifies as “far left” would find your post hysterical. They don’t even have a party to vote for anymore - best they can do is a begrudging vote for the NDP. This country has been on a rightward shift for decades. e.g. look at the hard push towards privatization of government services in Ontario.
This anecdote could be explained by something as simple as her forgetting to lock her bike consistently, locking it incorrectly, using poor locks, etc.
The 90s were a demographic golden age for Canada but people get old. This is a problem true of most of the western world and is upstream from almost any other issue.
Yes! I find it interesting that the Federal government is getting the majority of the blame for these issues when in reality I feel like provinces should be at fault.
Not to say that the federal government is without blame, but I feel like given the current state of healthcare in many provinces, as well as the housing s** show, provincial governments should be primarily held at fault.
Zoning/housing, Healthcare, education... Obviously the immigration loop holes have been an issue as well, but these three are provincial.
I don't see how it's odd at all. The kinds of changes that would stabilize housing and make growth more sustainable would threaten the interests of many wealthy people, including politicians themselves.
Demographics my friend. Somehow what should have been the most predictable thing ever (that people get old over time, changing the age profile of the country), has somehow created issues that are coming as a complete surprise to the government... Healthcare underfunded because people are getting old. Tertiary education overattended leading to a skills mismatch. A large cohort of baby boomers who consistently push for NIMBY style policies because they spent so much on their house that their retirement depends on it...
Policies should be proactive in these fields rather than reactive. I'm of the opinion that many countries /regions struggling with these issues have largely done it to themselves by lack of foresight.
I'm hopeful that it will improve in the future though. Pretty much only able to go up from here! Let's go land value tax!!!
Canada is in approximately the same unfortunate position of being a supplicant state of the US. This was apparent as far back as 2018 or so. The US "Commerce Department" recommended sanctions on Canada for a trade violation in timber. The worst case sanctions add about $9,000 to the cost of a new single family home in the US.
"March 2016, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and U.S. President Obama instructed their respective cabinet members responsible for international trade to explore all options for resolving the trade dispute.[32] Canada's international trade minister, Chrystia Freeland, said that "what we have committed to is to make significant, meaningful progress towards a deal—to have the structure, the key elements there a 100 days from now"."
Then:
"April 24, 2017, U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said his agency will impose new anti-subsidy tariffs averaging 20 percent on Canadian softwood lumber imports, a move that escalates a long-running trade dispute between the two countries...
"On April 25, 2017, the Trump administration announced plans to impose duties of up to 24% on most Canadian lumber, charging that lumber companies are subsidized by the government..."
Then:
"On August 19, 2024, the US raised tariff rates on imports of Canadian softwood lumber products from 8.05% to 14.54%".
Can you name a similarly wealthy country that is actually better today than it was on the date he started as a PM?
I can't. Seems like something else has been going on. Potentially you could name Ireland, by becoming a tax haven, screwing over everyone else instead.
Since 2015? Easy: Norway, Poland, Greece, Netherlands, Ireland, Singapore, USA probably.
But I do anecdotally agree with your point as a whole: it feels like there has been a slowing or potentially reversal of progress. Perhaps to be expected given the pandemic though.
Easy? You've lived in each of those places for more than a year around 2015 and around now? Physically impossible.
My second homebase is in one of the countries you named. I can tell you that not even 10% of the population would agree with you. Across the political spectrum. No idea that you're basing it on. Crumbling infrastructure, housing worse than Canada, ever increasing problems with immigration.
The US I could potentially agree with, it is the outlier, though debatable.
Ireland I talked about.
Norway is laughable to bring up, sorry. Might as well bring up Saudi Arabia.
If you'd been to Poland and Greece you'd know they're nowhere near "similarly wealthy" countries wrt Canada, entirely different tier. This reveals you haven't really spent time there.
Singapore is a city-state. I'm sure we can find a city in Canada that's doing better. And from what I know, Singaporeans too are majority unhappy with their country compared to 2015, so not sure what you're basing it on.
Depends who you are, I guess. If you’re a young person who is not financially stable enough to form a family because of high housing prices, then you would disagree. If you’re a relatively well-off person with assets like real estate and equities, then you’re quite happy. It’s all a matter of perspective.
I myself am doing quite well financially, but I am still quite unhappy with the current situation because of the devastating effects of inflation and increased housing costs specifically, have had on younger generations (despite the fact that it financially benefits me personally)
Take that problem in the states an multiply it by 3x in Canada.
Lower Income, High Prices, Less Options.
I'm in a similar position that I'm personally doing okay but almost everyone I grew up with has had to either leave Canada for the US, had to live with their parents into their 30s or more to very remote / rural areas to afford life.
Well, that is the ultimate philosophical rabbit hole.
If everyone is doing better objectively but have been hammered with propaganda so much that they subjectively believe they're doing worse, how do you square that?
I'd argue there's an easy solution in getting rid of the propagandists that are making everyone sad, so twitter, facebook etc.
Agreed, it’s a rabbit hole, so nobody is right. I’m just on the camp of — if people feel that they’re worse off than before, then telling them how “they have to feel better because of objective facts” won’t cut it.
Because even HN, by nature, is still an incredibly US-centric place. And has historically been a very capital-focused place where the stock market and GDP are taken as the only serious indicators by which to measure whether a country is doing well. Both of these points have very slowly been changing here, but the downvotes show it's still largely the same.
I spend my time between East-Asia and Europe, with one foot firmly in each of them, giving me a different perspective showing that Canada is the norm, not the outlier, which would be the US if there were to be one.
I still didn't expect it though, I thought here people would realize authoritarians aren't being voted in everywhere because the populace think things have been improving.
A big reason driving the collapse of the Canadian dollar is the incumbent government's climate change policy. Since being elected to power, the government has regulated, stalled and effectively defunded the fossil fuel industry, accounting for approx. 22-30% of Canada's GDP. That loss of revenue is felt in the dollar exchange.
This is not true in the slightest. Beyond the fact that the government went so far as to buy a pipeline to ensure added capacity for Alberta oil sands development, they've been enormously supportive of LNG development in BC, approving many projects and recently going so far as to give a $500M loan toward a project.
Please stop spreading lies and FUD. The pipeline buyout was too little too late after the government stalled and delayed permits over never-ending environmental assessments. All in all, the projected cost of capital flight exceeds $30 billion CAD (the article is from 2019):
The legislation almost completely predates the current government. Much of it comes from the Harper government who had to rework environmental legislation because the courts forced them too.
If people can't understand why this is happening, understand that Trudeau has been in power for 9 years and basically everything is worse than when he started. And if you want to say, "Blah blah it's happening in other countries", don't bother. We're becoming poorer when compared to all our peer countries.
Problem with First Past the Post voting systems, we tend to vote "strategically", and since the Alliance and PC's joined early augh's, the Right has been "unified" while the left is still split between the more centrist liberals and left NDP, with a small portion bled off for green's.
Would love to see explanations of downvotes since this is factually true...
I moved from a proportional-representation country to a FPTP one (Canada) and it's so much better to have a specific individual who is my MP.
Back where I was born, there's a grey and anonymous party list of people selected by extremely dubious internal party political means. I never felt the slightest bit represented; and the political process was completely opaque.
Now I have a dude with a newsletter, an email address, and an office.
I moved from a PR country to a FPTP one (Canada) and my experience is exactly the opposite - as a left-leaning individual in a conservative ward, there's no way for my vote to ever count. But yeah, now my interests are directly ignored by a dude with a newsletter, an email address, and an office.
Considering its a safe conservative riding, that engagement is ignored and goes no where. Politicians here are the same as anywhere else, they will focus on where the money and the votes come from and ignore the rest.
Which is why voting needs to be effective, and FPTP is exactly why there are so many "safe" ridings for the various parties.
Why would they engage with you? If they are safe, there's zero need for them to give you the time of day. How do you propose moderating someone who can tell you to fuck off with impunity?
Multiple proportional systems don't require lists and provide the best outcome.
Comparing FPTP to a worse system and decided FTPT is awesome while ignoring its known and widely discussed flaws surprises me. Its not really open for debate these days although people love to reject reality.
> Its not really open for debate these days although people love to reject reality.
Whenever I see something is not open for debate, I view it with a lot more skepticism. Almost always, this type of framing, to make an idea untouchable, leads to abuse. We saw this in a lot of the “trust authorities” type messaging in the pandemic.
One of the outcomes of the 2015 election was that we had an electoral reform committee that evaluated various electoral systems to see what best fixed Canada's problems. 88% of the experts that spoke to committee said that Proportional Representation was the best system for a country like Canada.
Maybe this issue is technically open for debate, but the enormously strong consensus from experts in the field weighs to one side of the issue.
Gravity's existence isn't open for debate, that doesn't mean there isn't more to learn about it.
The studied and understood outcomes of FPTP systems in the real world have all shown similar issues trending towards 2 party systems, being susceptible to vote splitting on one side of the spectrum and leading to 'strategic' instead of 'idealistic' voting.
There are worse systems by far, and better systems. Ignoring the bad because you can think of a single worse system is ignoring reality.
What? Of course it is! There are physicists looking for the unified theory who hypothesize that there may be a unified way of understanding all the forces. IANA physicist by any stretch so maybe I've misunderstood the Great Courses and books I've read, but gravity is actually quite poorly understood to us currently.
But the broader point about things not being open for debate is dangerous, and I think you unintentionally demonstrated a real-life reason why. If we stop questioning gravity and trying to understand it's cause better (which IMHO primiarly happens through reasoned, intelligent debate) then we stagnate, and stagnation can be dangerous as from there it's a short hop and a skip to regression.
If you want to make the argument though that some things aren't open for debate, I think there are stronger cases, like the Cartesian "I think therefore I am" is hard (though not impossible) to argue against because it forces the thinker to make arguments for their own non-existence, which is a tall order for a person who by definition must exist in order to do so.
Gravity isn't understood, but it exists as a force regardless. We know it does, no one debates it does, but whatever we _call_ it might change, and how we understand it will inevitably change.
That was my point. Gravity as a force exists, but the understanding of that force is still being developed. We might even change the name, but there is no doubt the force exists.
I should have worded it better. Extrapolating from that is probably not achieving much.
Ah fair, I do see your point on a difference between existence and understanding. Though, some of the theories I've heard basically posit that gravity doesn't really "exist" in any sense that we have of it now, but is rather just an exposed slice of some higher dimensional reality that we can't experience entirely. But, to your point, something obviously exists there because it's measurable, repeatable, etc, so from that perspective nobody is questioning it's existence.
Also what came to mind was picturing Einstein doing his thought experiment where he was in an elevator at various levels of acceleration, and his observation that there was no way to tell the difference between the force felt from gravity vs. the acceleration. That to me feels a lot like quesitoning the "existence" of gravity! But I don't think we're really disagreeing, more were just operating with different definitions in mind of "existence."
I am a centrist. There have been a ton of studies on various sides of the spectrum highlighting issues with FPTP as a system.
Its not they disagree with _me_, they disagree with the overall state of political science and its years of research into the outcomes of systems, not just what people "want"
> I moved from a proportional-representation country to a FPTP one (Canada) and it's so much better to have a specific individual who is my MP.
You're mixing things up. FPTP isn't what gives you "a dude with a newsletter, an email address, and an office" and prop-representation doesn't prohibit having one either.
FPTP has many many flaws, one being that it trends towards a defacto 2-party system due to strategic voting, especially if only one spectrum is divided (i.e. liberal/ndp, or alliance/progressive conservatives back a few decades ago).
The Anonymous Party list, and opaque process are not inherent factors on any of the replacements for FPTP, in fact the only one WITH the list was supposed to be an open list, and that was the system with the least political support.
Ranked/alternate voting, STV and other options directly address the issues with FPTP without introducing the drawbacks of MMP/unelected leaders being selected for seats.
Ranked/alternate voting and STV shouldn't be lumped into the same bucket.
Ranked voting is a majoritarian variant of FPTP that doesn't fix many of the flaws of FPTP. There is still the flaw of "favourite betrayal" that induces a need to vote "strategically".
Single Transferable Vote involves ranking candidates but is a Proportional System.
Alterate ranked voting somewhat addresses the idea of needing to strategically vote (favorite betrayal) in favour of your ideal candidate, but only to a degree depending on the parties and initial polling support (a runaway party you don't like will still lead to strategically voting for the party most likely to beat them). Its proportional in that the winners have to get at the most amount of votes across the ranks after eliminations, i.e. you can't win if no one picks you as second/third option, so you have to be picked by someone therefore you are considered to be representing them.
STV does a much better job of it and is why I was strongly in support of STV over AR/MMP or other options.
There is no way 2 parties can represent the diversity of opinions and ideas in the country.
2 parties means power tends to jump back and forth due to the recent ruling party doing badly vs the opposition actually providing an alternative and compelling change. This means parties tend to "lose" more than actually "win" elections.
2 dominant parties when one side of the spectrum is split among 2-3 parties tends to allow a smaller minority to achieve stronger governments which is not representative. I.E the split on the right in the 90's allowed the Liberals to have many successive majority governments despite less than 50% of support for many of those elections. In the aughts the alliance and PC merger turned that around and now the NDP and Liberals tend to split the left to a degree and the right can win a strong majority with 35-38% of the actual vote. This doesn't benefit any side long term.
"getting things done" isn't always the best metric for a political party, especially when they don't have the public support for their changes.
STV or various other methods that allow proportional results while maintaining current representation and government size were the best outcome, but didn't benefit the liberals so they dropped it.
In practice the entire government has been propped up by a leftist coalition between the Liberals and NDPs, in recent years, so functionally I think they have done just fine.
In fact, in a first-past-the-post system with a minority government you often end up giving disproportionate power to the third place party, in terms of the popular vote (in this case the NDP) because they hold up the government and can make significant demands in doing so. This has been absolutely borne out in Canada.
We did it to ourselves. Modern "small L" liberalism went completely overboard, and we're seeing that play out now in the rise of fascist leaning governments in the west. It will take a generation for the pendulum to swing back.
This is good news. His government has been dysfunctional for some time now. It's unfortunate that he held on for so long, as we needed a government ready to deal with Trump yesterday.
So it's all going down now eh? For those not on the pulse of CdnPoli, this is a primer I wrote a few weeks ago but is still widely relevant:
What we've been watching for the last 18 months has been the slow collapse of the governing Liberal Party, led by Justin Trudeau (LPC) - Polling and projections have been turning heavily against the LPC since last summer (2023), and the internal party cracks started showing after a by-election (special election, to fill an empty seat) loss in Toronto this summer and then one in Montreal not long after. Both Toronto and Montreal are considered the LPC's "heartland" and losses there suggest that the polls are correct in predicting a huge defeat for the LPC in a general election. A few Members of Parliament (MPs) began pressuring Trudeau to step down as party leader (and therefore Prime Minister (PM)) and some announced that they would not run again. At time of writing, a third by-election has just been lost by the Liberals.
The next Canadian general election must be held no later than October 2025. That is because the last election was in late 2021. That 2021 election led to a "minority government" in which the Liberal Party won the most individual seats (districts, ridings, constituencies, etc.) but not more than half of them. As a Westminster Parliament with plurality voting (First Past the Post, winner-takes-all) coalitions are not common in Canada, and the minority government usually operates on a vote-by-vote basis with other parties, while allowing their party to form the government. Some votes, notably ones about the budget, are called "confidence votes" and if one fails, the government has "lost the confidence of the House of Commons" and must either call an election or allow opposition parties to try to gain the confidence of the house and form a new government.
Minority governments do not usually last the full length before another general election must be called by law. This one has lasted longer than average because the LPC signed an agreement with a smaller party called the NDP. The NDP demanded some new welfare policies such as subsidized dental care and some medications and in return would support the LPC in confidence votes. The NDP's leader, Jagmeet Singh, announced this fall that he was ending the agreement with the LPC and would only support the government on a case-by-case basis. This is likely to save some of his party's own polling numbers, as they have also faltered (the junior party in coalitions or similar situations almost always fall more than the senior party, worldwide) but do result in the NDP looking weak as they heavily criticize the LPC government yet vote to keep it governing the country. The NDP do not want an election right now for several reasons: their own polling numbers are not good, they can squeeze more out of a minority LPC than the Conservatives who are strong favourites to win the next election (we'll get to them, don't worry), the party machine is short on money (they recently spent a lot of their funds on a close provincial election in British Columbia) and possibly because Singh wants to ensure himself and a few of his MPs have been elected long enough to meet the minimum requirement for a government pension. This last point has been heavily debated and used in Conservative attack ads, so make of it what you will.
So, what are Canadians unhappy about? The biggest item is cost of living - most things boil down to how much it costs for a roof over your head and food in your fridge. Housing costs have been astronomical in Vancouver and Toronto for decades, but have been rapidly increasing across the country. Another is immigration - like many countries, Canada's population is aging and there has long been a cross-partisan consensus that immigration is a great way to counter this. But since the pandemic the LPC increased immigration levels massively, especially in 2 sectors: student visas which were being taken advantage of by "diploma mill" shoddy private colleges that promised immigrants a pathway to residence, and low-skill temporary foreign workers (TFWs) who are employed in fast food or other entry-level positions. Not only has this put much more strain on the housing supply in major urban areas like Toronto or Vancouver, but it also brings down wages and facilitates abuse of these unfortunate people who just want to build a better life for themselves and their family. The LPC has also faced a lot of scandals. Every government is corrupt and has scandals, but there have been a lot from this government: from SNC-Lavalin and WE Charity earlier, to ArriveCAN and a cabinet minster lying about indigenous heritage to win government contracts more recently. As in the US, opioids have been devastating to Canadians, with tent encampments and overdose deaths no longer limited to just Vancouver's infamous Downtown Eastside. Police departments complain that the justice system is not responding well to repeat offenders either due to bail reforms or bleeding-heart judges. Finally there's the anti-incumbent bias we've seen in elections worldwide throughout 2024 and the Canadian trend of voting out a government after around a decade in power.
So let's get into who are likely to come next - the Conservative Party of Canada (CPC), led by Pierre Polievre since 2022. The CPC was last in power under Stephen Harper from 2006-2015 and has a lot of support in the western provinces of Canada, plus competes with the LPC and NDP in the suburbs of major cities. Polievre is a pugilistic career politician who has very successfully channelled the anger Canadians are feeling into a commanding polling lead. Polievre has been called a populist because he has levied much more criticism of the LPC government than policy suggestions, and for his schtick of reducing issues into "verb the noun" such as "axe the [carbon] tax", "build the homes" and "end the crime." But listening to his earlier speeches in Parliament suggest that Polievre is much more of a policy "wonk" than his current campaigning suggests.
When Parliament returns in March with a new Liberal Party leader (and Prime Minister), it is almost certain to be defeated immediately and an election will be called.
> When Parliament returns in March with a new Liberal Party leader
Trudeau will ask for, and likely get, a prorogation to give them time to choose a new leader. Add the 51 days for the election and it's likely to be a fall election.
Is it just me or is the quality of politicians on a downward spiral? Between retirement-age out-of-touch boomers, clueless good-looking male liberals and corrupt authoritarian plutocrats, it sure feels like there's a shortage of honest hard-working people in leadership positions.
I mean it is kinda obvious that the system in western democracies is structurally flawed such that there's a selection bias for crooks and incompetent assholes (lobbying, i.e. legalized bribery), but still, how come the bad guys always seem to win? Or is this just a symptom of a deeper malady of modern society?
I'm not saying nothing's changed, but there was a lot of dirt on previous politicians that didn't get surfaced and pored over in the 20th century, as it has been in the 21st. The saying about not wanting to know how sausages or legislation gets made, is a pretty old one.
Not just you. And to answer your question, I don't think it's politicians but the entire way that society disagrees and discusses important topics.
I've been working on a side project over the holidays related to this, but nothing to share yet unfortunately. Suffice to say, I would love it if we could frame discussions around specific policy issues, and focus on listening to one another and prioritizing and agreeing on problems as a first step before jumping straight into political rhetoric and speaking only to one's own base or those who already agree with you.
Also somewhat related - the history of decline of political discourse is staggering. Apparently in the US, Abraham Lincoln used to debate by having 90 minutes of uninterrupted complex analysis. This has been replaced by modern debate formats like those popularized by the Jubilee YouTube channel which optimize for 10 second clips.
Interestingly, there is a counter movement where long-form interviews are becoming popular again among niche crowds who actually want to hear and discuss issues. Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, Lex Friedman, Sam Harris, Destiny to name a few. I don't think we've seen the end of the changes for these discussion mediums. Hopefully we'll see changes for the better!
>I've been working on a side project over the holidays related to this, but nothing to share yet unfortunately.
What kind of project?
>Interestingly, there is a counter movement where long-form interviews are becoming popular again among niche crowds who actually want to hear and discuss issues
Indeed. Personally, I wish we could have that kind of content, but edited to remove the filler (redundancy, time spent reasoning out a position) while still accurately representing nuanced views and the evidence for them.
I don't think so. I think that the archetype of what a politician should look like has broadened from a hypermasculine silver fox rich-grandpa type with a mid-Atlantic accent. Bill Clinton was the last one.
I have migrated from Canada to the USA and my metrics for wealth, ease of mind, actually working while at work, outgoingness, etc instantly improved. I don't plan on ever going back. I feel chagrin at seeing Canada fail. I'm glad to see Justin Trudeau pressured out, I know there won't be meaningful change associated with the decision, but I have hope.
I'm a Canadian living in the US as well. I definitely make more and am able to save more here. I have better job opportunities and also more interesting work. Where I am the weather is also much better. If money wasn't an issue I'd move back to Canada in an instant (but maybe my view of Canada is outdated, been away for > 10 years). Why?
- Lower wealth inequality
- Safer, with lower crime rates, especially violent crime
I lived in the US for around ten years after college and moved back early during COVID. I'd always wanted to go back, and had the possibility of keeping my American salary and working remotely; it seemed like a no-brainer, given how unstable things were feeling in the US at the time.
FWIW, my view of Canada has dimmed considerably. The two things that I felt really set us apart when I left and over those ten years were (and these are intertwined) the stronger Canadian social safety net and the sense that, in general, Canadian culture was kinder, more progressive, smarter, and less racist. But the last few years have really put that to the test. Meanwhile, in my time in the US, I really started to appreciate the aspects of American culture that are lacking up here.
It's been kind of heartbreaking. I was seriously thinking of exploring going back to the US permanently. And then last November happened, and it's too unpalatable at this juncture, once again.
While Canadian wealth inequality is still not as bad as the US, it has gotten significantly worse in recent years as a housing crisis has created a deep split between haves and have-nots. Personally, I think this more than anything else is responsible for the backlash against Trudeau, especially among young people who otherwise would typically be left-leaning.
The US is good to anyone who can pay. And my career made it such that I earn a lot more in the US that I would in Canada, so the US has been good to me. It's unclear how widespread that experience actually is. There's a lot of statistics that this is one of the best times to be alive (despite our very cynical / negative attitude about it).
But personally, I have no intent of going back, if only because of the weather.
Or if you have older family members you care about. Or if you don't want your children having to practice 'active shooter' drills during their school days.
Many of my friends are also thinking of just leaving to Europe. This whole thing about running after more and more money may just not be worth it at the end.
Nowhere is perfect, but I see many places in the EU as a great lifestyle arbitrage. If someone made or can continue to make US level money while living in the EU, that's a great situation. Depending on the country, visas can be challenging, but most HN skillsets will qualify for digital nomad visas.
We bought a place 2 years ago and are in the process of fixing up (it was used as a vacation home).
My grandparents emigrated from the US to Canada in the late 80s when they were in their 60s. One of their daughters had married a Canadian decades before and she sponsored them. They loved it. They felt like they got better care up there.
The meme goes that in Canada if you have an expensive healthcare need the government will offer euthanasia. Is that not true? How come euthanasia is now the fourth leading cause of death in Canada?
Is it because people outside of 18 and 65 don't have to pay rent or a mortgage? Also one of the often touted benefits of Canada to US is the public healthcare system, but after 65 most people are on Medicare which is adequate and under 25 generally under your parents insurance.
Genuinely curious whats better under Canadian system for the young and old.
There is no social safety net. Half my town burned down in a national park, including my own home. You think the Federal government did anything? You think there was any net at all?
The Federal government even had the gall to refuse my 2 year old's passport renewal for example because I only paid the renewal fee, and not an additional fee for the passport getting destroyed before expiration date that was buried under 10 pages of fine print that I missed because we were homeless with a toddler. And they already had my CC# on the application anyway, but because I didn't explicitly mark down the extra fee, the application was refused.
Now we've found a new home in a new town at our own expense, and we can't see a doctor. My 2 year old can't see a doctor. There's not enough doctors and practices won't take on new patients unless you go on a years-long wait list. This is our "free" healthcare. If you're dying, you can go to an emergency room and wait for 8 hours to see a doctor. If you need anything routine you're fucked if you don't have a family doctor. We had one, but our town burnt down and now it'll be years before we have one again.
You know how we access healthcare? We go to Europe. We go to my wife's country of origin twice a year to visit family and get healthcare. I had a surgery there (wait in Canada was 2 years, in the EU I got it done in 2 days), our son has had all his checkups and most of his vaccines done there.
This social safety net is a myth, a theory. It exists until you actually try to access it.
edit - the only help we received was our insurance company, a private corporation. So what's the difference versus the US apart from our much higher taxes and lower wages?
I've never really thought we had something resembling a safety net, just a variety of social services that are theoretically available, but only to varying degrees and mostly not in rural areas, which seems to be one of the defining schisms of the last century whether it's suburban -> normal urban or rural -> urban.
On one hand, I guess your tragic situation is exactly what I'd expect private home insurance to cover, aside from burglary and other natural disasters, but on the other it's becoming an annual occurrence anywhere west of Calgary, and like many other tragedies, massive holes are being exposed in the artificially scarce and super inflated stock of available housing in any given area; living in a town in a national park is somewhat exceptional on every front, but having literally no backup plan if a whole town disappears is revealing of comically inept levels of government. I know some Lytton residents! are also basically camping, waiting on help from the province that may never come.
That is to say, some parts of our social service systems and economy work—or at least aren't horribly broken—if and only if nothing unexpected happens or we don't grow or shrink population wise or culturally at all. There's basically no margin.
One could say things would be better with more money, but that's just a matter of degree, it's not like GDP going up would automatically prevent displacement or create more doctors, it would just give individuals a bit more leverage potentially when something bad happens. We desperately require better feedback loops tied into the bedrock of our society, better incentives.
The problem isn't the non-existence of a social safety net per se, the problem is our taxation rate is as high as countries with a functional social safety net, but we don't actually receive those services.
Both the US and European models are valid IMO. But in Canada we get the worst of both.
As someone who is going to be 65 in a couple years and is researching Medicare options... it seems like a bit of a mess. The drug plans have been separated out so you have to buy those separately. If you get an "advantage" plan then you've got the same old "in-network" "out of network" BS to deal with and they can and do deny coverage. If you get plain old Medicare (probably what I'll opt for) you can theoretically see any doctor (but there are some that don't take Medicare) but you still have to buy a "Medigap" plan. Looking at the costs for my wife and I being on Medicare is still going to be something like $700/month so don't think that when you get to Medicare age that you won't have to pay any insurance premiums anymore. We're currently paying about $400/month for a silver plan and dental through the ACA so our premiums will actually go up under Medicare.
If you're posting on Hacker News, you probably have a skill set that'll allow you to get a job covered by a TN.
You go to border control, tell them you're applying for a TN, hand them a copy of your identification, resume, credentials, and offer letter. Then you wait for a couple of hours while they process you, and you're set for the next few years. Rinse and repeat until your job sponsors you for an H1-B or you marry an American citizen and can apply for a Green Card.
Of course, there's other ways - talk to an immigration lawyer - but that's the simplest.
Not a lawyer, but isn't that kind of dicey? The TN is non-immigration and temporary - it's not supposed to be used if you have any intention of permanently migrating. I'd worry about it putting your TN status in jeopardy.
True but that doesn't really impact your ability to apply for a Green Card from TN. You have to wait 91 days [0] since your last entry before making an adjustment of status application.
Every year thousands of people in statuses like F-1, O-1 and TN get employment based green cards. The idea that you have to be in H-1B or L-1 status to get an employment GC is simply 100% false.
In the conversation of moving to the US for work 90% of visas are going to be non immigrant so saying all non immigrant visas are equivalent is needlessly obtuse.
An H1b allows the person to enter the country with the intention of getting a GC and can do so without having to leave the country.
A TN visa is re issued every single time you cross the border and can be denied by a border guard on any amount of misrepresentation
Secondly, your advice about the 90 day rule without context is both bad advice and can get someone's visa cancelled and stuck out of the country.
For future readers. Don't take this advice, ask a lawyer and if you intend to get a GC don't go on a TN unless you want legal complexity.
British Columbia is now poorer than Idaho, again, while being much more expensive. Ontario and Quebec and Canada as a whole are now poorer than West Virginia.
You say "now" as though it's ever not been the case. These comparisons do a poor job of taking into account cost-of-living and quality-of-life; it's simply not the case that you're better off in Montgomery than Toronto.
> The person living in Montgomery can easily afford a house and a middle-class life. Can the person in Toronto?
Of course not. But a person living in New York City - making the much higher median household income of 75K USD - also can't afford a house or a middle-class life there. And yet across almost every metric New York is considered a better place to live with higher quality of life than Alabama.
> also can't afford a house or a middle-class life there.
So can you compare cost of living between NYC and Toronto and does the difference in median account for COL difference ?
Would be interesting to hear some first hand experiences from people who lived in both or similarly comparable US/Canadian cities. I was under the impression that Chinese investment in Canadian real estate really destroyed the housign market. I feel like the growing popularity of investing in residential real estate is a global phenomena but some markets are more exposed to some effects than others so it's possible to get some intuition on what impacts it.
Yeah, you're probably - in most regards, depending on various things - better off living in NYC than Toronto (having lived in both). But that's at least a conversation worth having, a comparison worth making. Comparing Canada to the poorest places in America like the person I was replying to was solely on the basis of average wealth only makes sense if you've never been within spitting distance of either.
I have lived in both. It's easier to afford a Canadian home, despite their price, especially in Montreal but even in Toronto, compared to NYC or SF, for the median person. The median household income in NYC is ~80k, vs ~95k in Toronto.
Sure, but on the other hand that's just as true for income in the US, the disparity in average income between major cities and the rest of the US is even sharper than it is in Canada.
The social services are better in Canada though. The big downside is the lack of quickly available treatment for serious-but-not-life-threatening illness.
> The big downside is the lack of quickly available treatment for serious-but-not-life-threatening illness.
Which often happens in the US as well. I recall having to wait 3 months to get in to see a gastroenterologist about 10 years ago. People living in rural areas of the US often face this so it's not like it's a problem exclusive to Canada or other countries with universal healthcare.
It doesn’t help if you can’t afford a house. If you just look at a simple crude statistic like gdp per capital US is 83% higher. You can’t make stuff appear out of thin air, there’s less resources to go around and people are objectively worse off
It actually does help, in fact it helps MORE if you cant afford a house, or are homeless, to have a strong social net.
Not arguing that the US isn't richer or can offer more financial resources to its citizens.
No that's the thing, you can't get the treatment if it doesn't exist.
For the years that i was living in Ontario there were only 3 MRI machines across the entire province. The waiting period for that diagnostic MRI ranged from anywhere between 10 and 24 months. If doctors were even convinced you were worth getting it.
You could die from something before you could even end up getting properly diagnosed with it.
You might not have competent enough doctors in some countries for specialist treatment if you need it. A popular Canadian Youtuber who lives in Japan (which generally has great medical care) decided to relocate to the United States during the time they were undergoing their particular cancer treatment a couple of years ago. Japanese yakuza bosses pretty famously obtained their illegal organ transplants at UCLA Medical instead of in Japan...
The US's system is certainly flawed but it guarantees that you can obtain the best care possible if you can afford it. That's much better than not being able to get the care even if you can afford it.
> For the years that i was living in Ontario there were only 3 MRI machines across the entire province.
Jesus. I've got more MRI machines than that within walking distance of my house.
It does seem to have improved significantly, as in 2020 Ontario had 124 (which made it the best provisioned province at the time). When were you there?
Do those machines operate 24/7? I'm Canadian and get regular (publicly funded) MRIs as part of my healthcare needs and they always happen on time, and close to home. Zero issues. Sometimes you get appointments at weird hours but that's because they run them constantly.
We could definitely use more and our healthcare system could definitely use serious improvements, but the way it's talked about amongst Americans often seems a little divorced from reality.
Is that not two different tradeoffs? One is first come first serve and the other is purely if you have the resources at the time? The only people I see that praise the "guarantee if you can afford it", are indeed, the ones that can afford it.
Soviet bread lines were first come first serve too and I don't know any former Soviet state residents gushing about how great those times were. Those 3 MRI machines that I mentioned had to service 1/3 of the population of Canada at the time -- about 10 million people.
Saying "oh that's just first come first serve" is totally missing the fact that the service level can be woefully inadequate.
What's really crazy is that I live in a small city of about 100k people and there are about a dozen hospitals that I can choose from, first-class trauma centers, multiple renowned research centers (affiliated with three different universities). None of that is counting all of the urgent care and other facilities in the area.
I have an order of magnitude more options for treatment than I did when living in New York City...
The only way I could open myself up to more/better care options would be to move to Texas.
Life expectancy is, perhaps counterintuitively, not highly connected to health care. The major factors contributing to the gap between US and Canadian life expectancy are car accidents, homicides, and cardiovascular disease, and CVD differs wildly depending where you are in the country; there are states that lead the G7 in CVD outcomes, and others (like Mississippi and Alabama) that look like developing-world countries.
None of this is to defend the US system in particular, which wildly overspends on the outcomes it achieves. But generally, when it comes to managing chronic and acute health conditions, those outcomes are very good.
Possibly it does have that bias (which is to be expected considering its origins and target audience), but I've generally found a good faith and generous reception to pro-EU arguments (in counter to pro-USA comments) here as well.
There’s some impetus to stay on to bring some stability when Trump comes into office. A Shock Doctrine approach (new leader at the same time as the US gets one) is going to create an environment where a number of regressive policies will get pushed through.
There’s a good chance Trump will say that he endorses Pierre Pollievre in the coming months causing a number of Canadians to turn their nose at him. This is also a calculated risk.
very true. love him or hate him, Trudeau deserves credit for surviving not just sexual assault allegations, but also the infamous blackface/brownface pictures[0], all during the height of #MeToo and leftist focus on identity politics. he wisely identified that the correct response was no response, except for notably stating that the sexual assault accuser simply "experienced their encounter differently"[1]. a lesser politician would have apologized, a tacit admission of guilt, and been forced to resign.
this isn't meant to be snippy or sarcastic, either. he was genuinely excellent at playing the political game and protecting his own career.
I'm having trouble learning anything from this stream of disconnected, time-sorted tweetlike objects. I'm posting this on the off chance that a better article exists, and someone can point me to it. I assume it's too early for that though.
Canada has no term limit. Leaders stay on until they have lost the support of their party.
Often that happens after a devastating election loss.
In this case it is happening because of his extreme unpopularity before the election and his parties hope of improving their election prospects under a different leader
Elections have a deadline after which a new election can be called, but there's no number of terms served that then stops a re-elected leader from taking office if they win another election. It's not the case that people can just stay in office without holding elections forever.
you can't compare the US here. a prime minister is not just like a speaker of the house. in many countries world wide the prime minister takes on most of the responsibilities that in the US are fulfilled by the president. the prime minister effectively runs the country, while the president is just a figure head having mostly ceremonial duties. the role of the president in the US is different, and an exception to the common rule.
at least some of the reasons why the US president has a term limit could therefore also apply to other countries prime ministers.
that is true, but in the countries with a prime minister i know about, as far as i am aware, noone has that kind of power. in other countries the concept of an executive order appears not to even exist. in my brief search i only found something comparable in france can be issued by the council of ministers. everywhere else only parliament can do that. nevertheless in those countries the prime minister is the most powerful person running the country, and the president is a figurehead.
Almost? The proposed amendment that passed the House but failed in the Senate? If 3/4 of the states were going to pass an amendment then why wouldn't 2/3 call for a convention of the states?
True. And I believe every system will eventually be gamed to some amount. You do occasionally need change. But if you were to artificially enforce some "full rewrite" reform e.g. every n decades, that reform would just end up a tug of war between sides already deep into the existing gaming, trying to increase the effect of whatever tactic their side excels in.
One candidate for a possible workaround that I've occasionally been speculating about would be an organized process where n groups are tasked with doing n "rewrites" in parallel, and then a process that somehow mixes approval and random selection to pick one. The rationale would be the hope that the low chance of a particular rewrite actually making it would add some distance, would reduce the gaming-the-system incentives. Everybody has some amount of motivation to actually design a fair system, but that's competing with incentive to make it gameable by whatever side the co-author in question is on. But that fairness incentive would not really be diminished much by writing a what-if instead of a definitive future, whereas the incentive to deliberately flaw the would-be system to make it easier to game gets lower with a shrinking likelihood of the proposal actually getting implemented.
Was it failure to introduce ranked voting, or failure to introduce electoral reform?
There was multiple systems being suggested. NDP preferred MMP. Personally I wanted STV, but the Liberal party wanted alternate vote, the system that would benefit them the most.
Once they realized public and other party support was for systems other than Alternative Vote they backed out.
No, it would be a landslide only in one sense, the first past the post sense. Not in any other sense. The majority of individuals would still not want the cons in power, but with FPTP the left vote gets split.
Would it be possible for it to not happen right away? They are in a minority government without a PM, I really wonder if there's a way the elections aren't triggered basically instantly.
With Trudeau leaving, I suspect that at least one of the other parties will give them enough time to elect a new leader before bringing down the government. The government may even last until the required election date of late October however, nothing of any importance will likely be passed in that time
Unfortunately, the liberal party rules say they require a minimum of four months to elect a new leader. They may be able to fast track it in three months, but it’s entirely up to the liberal party so I suspect Trudeau will still be leader when Parliament resumes.
I wonder if he could still do it last minute. Like could we switch to proportional representation in the last months? It’d be a better system and may even (cynically) help his own party in the next election so there’d be some incentive.
They don't want proportional representation. If they did, they would have had it. Trudeau killed the electoral reform committee precisely because the NDP and Bloc insisted the would only accept PR and not Ranked Ballots (Trudeau's preference) and the Conservatives would prefer no change at all.
PR would force the Liberals to co-govern in coalition with the NDP basically forever. They don't want it. Their enthusiasm for Ranked Ballots is for the opposite reason: they realize they are the 2nd choice of "most" Canadians (or were until the last few months...). Given that, and the near-extinction event they suffered pre-2015 and the rise of Trudeau II, you can understand why they'd prefer that...
BC perplexingly chose otherwise. People always seem to hate this. Even here in California, we’re lucky to be able to rank everyone in SF but few other cities can. And every election, there’s a lot of “IRV is ruining this city” when candidates with fewer first choice votes win.
Alaska got Ranked Choice Voting and after every election cycle where a Democrat wins they're up in arms about how it's bad. This time the repeal effort got within a whisker of succeeding, while the Democrat (Mary Peltola) lost her congressional seat.
RCV encourages moderation, meaning candidates like Peltola and Senator Murkowski (R) win statewide office. This distresses people who feel like such moderates are very far from their own views.
Ranked choice isn't the only alternative voting system that encourages moderation. Approval voting is vastly simpler to understand and implement and also accomplishes many of the same benefits.
Simplicity is an underrated value when it comes to elections. People are more likely to trust that which they can easily understand. And ranked choice, fairly or not tends to cause a lot of confusion.
Unfortunately, I rarely see people who hate IRV/RCV because they want it replaced with approval voting. Usually it's that their candidate/party of choice would fare worse under it.
But they know they live in a state where any presidential candidate with (R) next to their name can win by 10-20 points. So they wonder how such a state can elect a Democrat without something underhanded going on. A working theory is that the RCV system is "too confusing" for some folks and it leads to the D candidate winning an "undeserved" victory.
The Duchess of Alaska is a "moderate" only insofar as her first and overriding loyalty is to the what the permanent Federal Civil Service in DC wants. She'll agree with anyone of any ideological stripe so long as she knows the will of the bureaucracy is being carried out.
I hear you and this is such a lazy argument against IRV. Do they really lack the imagination to understand why this is a feature, not a bug in IRV?
IRV, though imperfect, is so clearly superior to one candidate voting if the goal is a responsive democracy. Unfortunately, there are many people who don't want that. IRV closes a loophole for extreme candidates (I have a strong suspicion that the 2016 djt campaign would have been thwarted by IRV had the gop primary used it). It also allows partially aligned challengers to pressure incumbents without dividing the electorate. This would likely be better for the challenger and the incumbent. Consider this past election where Jill Stein was demonized as a spoiler, which she potentially was, but would not have been in ranked choice. I bet there are a lot of voters who would have rather voted for Jill Stein but instead cast their vote for a candidate whom they thought could win (including candidates who received what should have been Jill Stein votes and thus lost important information about what matters to their voters). This is bad for everyone except those who don't believe in responsive democracy and largely rewards career politicians, political consultants and lobbyists.
> instead you've just handed us to the conservatives
I agree that the conservatives are not a good choice, but apparently for the opposite reason as you - the conservatives are unlikely to be able to fix much of the damage Trudeau has inflicted on the country, especially w.r.t. unfettered immigration.
The PPC is the only one with any sensible policies IMO, but unfortunately they won't be competitive in the upcoming national election.
> Trudeau has faced mounting pressure to resign amid polling that showed his ruling Liberal Party was likely to be swept out of power in the next election by the opposition Conservative Party. The prime minister has also become deeply unpopular over a range of issues, including the soaring cost of living and immigration. His leadership as further thrown into question when his finance minister abruptly quit in December.
As someone with no knowledge of the topic, why was electrical reform needed? Wouldn't one assume that either party motivated to do it while in power would be doing it with the goal of positively affecting the outcome for their party in the future? It would seem weird for a candidate to reform how voting works knowing it could negatively affect their side, right?
> Canada uses a first past the post system for federal elections, which usually boils down to a two party state equilibrium
To be fair, that two-party equilibrium is the thing that keeps every minor political crisis from causing no-confidence votes and failed governments because all of the special interests involved break the coalition.
Other Parliamentary governments that don't have this kind of equilibrium end up with minor political parties holding massively outsized influence and concessions just to keep them in the coalition. See Denmark (this is pretty much the subject of every season of Borgen).
The only time a Finnish government coalition has failed due to a loss of confidence was in the early 80s. Prime ministers occasionally change mid-term and minor parties sometimes leave the coalition, but the coalition always continues until the next regular elections.
And the reason for this stability is trivial. If a party leaves a coalition and the coalition loses parliamentary majority, that party is effectively a major party. Potential prime ministers are rarely stupid enough or desperate enough to give small parties that kind of power. Instead, they prefer making the coalition a bit wider by adding another small party or two.
We also have the Swedish People's Party, which specializes as a reliable coalition partner. They are willing to collaborate with pretty much anyone. As long the coalition agrees to uphold the rights of the Swedish-speaking minority, they will give it another 4-5% support without too much drama.
Finland is also just about the most ethnically, religiously, demographically and linguistically homogenous nation you could pick from.
That affords you the social cohesion to avoid these things. Much moreso than Denmark and orders of magntitude moreso than Canada.
You just generally agree with each other more, in your own socially-distant, Finnish way. Kippis!
Also the comments about the Swedish-speaking minority interest are a bit weird in historical context -- Swedish used to be the dominant language in Finland until the Swedish-speaking nobility decided to promote the Finnish language and identity. It isn't exactly weird that their remnants today would be able to promote their own interests...
Your perception of Finland is stuck in the 20th century. Today's Finland is roughly 10% immigrants. If the current trend continues, the fraction should increase to ~15% by 2030. That would be comparable to the US.
As for the Swedish-speaking minority, it's mostly a result of colonization in the middle ages. Swedish became the dominant language in some coastal areas, while the rest of present-day Finland spoke a variety of Finnic languages. During both Swedish and Russian rule, Swedish was used as the administrative language, and the elites used it among themselves. But even among the elites, Swedish was often not their native language.
> Finland is also just about the most ethnically, religiously, demographically and linguistically homogenous nation you could pick from.
Considering it has pretty much had effectively two primary languages for the past several hundreds years that seems like a stretch? Two of the most famous Finns of all time like Linus Torvalds or Mannerheim didn't even speak Finnish as their first language. Not exactly a sign of "linguistic homogeneity"..
We use preferential voting and haven't had a minority government, that is a government formed by coalition as the result of an election since 2010. We still typically have 2 major parties and 3-4 minor parties that can (but by no means always) hold the balance of power, particularly in the senate. It means that the govt has to compromise more often to get bills passed, but the minority parties rarely hold legislation hostage (barring things like the Housing Future Fund, which was a dog's breakfast).
We have two left parties that votes are split across, and a single right party.
This means the conservative party often ends up getting more power since they're "first past the post" even though the majority of the population may not agree with them.
I beg to differ, the polls say otherwise regarding who the population wants and more importantly, the unhealthy coalition of NDP / Liberals have been preventing the parliament from functioning, we would have had an election by now had NDP stopped propping the Liberal party by preventing the non confidence vote.
So? "The rules need to be changed because the wrong people keep winning" sounds very suspicious to me.
If the situation is as you describe, what really needs to change is that the two left parties need to merge, or one of them needs to become such a marginal player that it doesn't matter. If the leaders of those parties can't or won't do that, well, then you get the situation that you have.
> So? "The rules need to be changed because the wrong people keep winning" sounds very suspicious to me.
That's not what they're saying. In Canada, we can easily end up with parliamentary majorities for parties that have less than 50% of the popular vote. Sometimes substantially less.
No, I got that part. That's true in any first-past-the-post system, and especially true in ones with more than two major parties. (The solution to that would be proportional representation rather than first-past-the-post.)
But the complaint seemed to be, not that it kept happening, but that it kept favoring the Conservatives. So, on the one hand, the fact that it keeps favoring one party is an issue. On the other hand, the way the complaint was made makes it sound like it's not coming from a position of objectivity.
Some believe that it’s better if representative democracies represent their constituents. Newer voting technology that permits a greater alignment of representative distribution with voter distribution is preferable to those people.
Personally, I find it galling that the massive Californian population of Republicans and Texan population of Democrats frequently go unrepresented.
You seem to believe in the primacy of FPTP voting in itself. That’s the difference.
That seems a misunderstanding of their argument. I suggest using an LLM, quoting the comment, and discussing with it till your comprehension matches that of the machine. They’re usually pretty good at it, and it appears better than you in this instance.
Canada has a FPTP system but multiple parties. This means that it becomes possible to form a distorted, outsized government (even a majority government!) with a remarkably little amount of the popular vote. In 2019 the Liberals won the election and took 46% of the seats with a mere 33% of the vote. That is a remarkable distortion.
The argument as to why electoral reform is needed is because of this distortion and the view that the FPTP system itself is resulting in peculiar outcomes that do not reflect the actual wishes of the voting public.
People are failing to read between the lines here.
Trudeau wanted electoral reform. But only one kind of electoral reform. A ranked ballot system.
When he couldn't get that, because the NDP and Bloc said "No F'ing Way" (for reasons I'll get into below), he sabotaged the whole committee and forced it shut.
After that he only had minority governments. So there was no way he was going to re-open the issue because he still wouldn't get the result he wanted.
Why ranked ballots, and why are the NDP opposed to them?
Because in a ranked ballot system the Liberals would be the 2nd choice of the majority of Canadians. It would effectively end the NDP as a viable electoral party. At least that's now the NDP saw it. I think a look at other ranked ballot system countries would definitely provide evidence that it tends to produce two-party system outcomes (see Australia, effectively a two party system)
The NDP's preference is for a Mixed Member Proportional system like in Germany. As a partner in a coalition minority gov't with Trudeau there is no way they would have accepted anything else. And key people in the Liberal party will never ever accept such a system, since it would mean governing forever along with the NDP, their ideological opponent (no matter what other people might tell you.)
So, yeah, screw Trudeau, and thank god he's gone (he should have resigned after he failed a majority last time around), but I think people need to dig more on this issue and why he might be saying this:
He wants "electoral reform" and regrets not getting it, because if they had accomplished what they wanted (ranked ballots), they would probably have a good chance at another election win. Yikes.
As a close watcher of Canadian politics, here's the best summary I can offer for those not familiar:
Overal Picture
Canada has seen gdp-per-capita decline for nearly every quarter over the past 3 years. Large stimulus spending during the pandemic fueled the housing crisis and added massive inflation. Stimulating the economy through similarly massive increases in Non-Permanent Residents has kept GDP afloat, but come at the cost of over-burdening public institutions and housing. Contiuing either policy is not possible and deeply unpopular. Canadians now pay more taxes than any US state, have housing more expensive than New York, but with productivity below that of the poorest state and our dollar running a major discount. This while our public instutions are struggling to meet demand.
1. Recurring themes in Canadian Politics
2. Recent history of the federal liberals
3. Current issues facing the government
Recurring Themes in Canadian Politics
- Unlike the U.S. where there are multiple strong centers of politics and commerce (East Cost, West Coast, Texas), Canada political power is centered largely along the St. Lawrence River where most of the country's population lives.
- Trends arising from this include: Quebec receiving, relative to its population, outsized benefits and influence in exchange for remaining part of the country and as result of French speaking requirements for the federal government. Quebec has nearly exited the country several times
- Canada is still largely a resource-based economy and possess an impressive amount of natural resources: oil, natural gas, largest uranium reserves in the world, more freshwater than all other countries combined, etc.
- The concentration of power in the East while most resource development happening in the West, creates a quasi-colonial between the Ontario/Quebec and the younger and resource heavy provinces, particularly the Prairies.
- Economically, Canada priviledges large incumbent businesses and most of its sectors are oligopolies. The reasoning for doing so historically has been to fend of larger, well funded US competitors.
Recent History of the federal liberals
- Liberals have historically have been centrist party, taking popular ideas from both socialist NDP (who have yet to win a federal election) and the federal Conservative party (itself a coaltion of social and fiscal conservatives created by Harper in the 90s).
- 2015 Justin Trudeau came in as the most popular Prime Minister in history with a majority government. Major legislation included legalizing weed and improvements to Child Benefits. The majority was lost in 2019 with Conservatives gaining the popular vote.
Overall Picture - In Detail
- Economic Issue #1: Lagging economy. Canada is still largely a resource based economy (see above) and business investment in that sector, and Canada overall, declined drastically starting in 2015, arguably due to increasing opportunities for resource development in the U.S. and the Canadian Federal Government stance towards non-reweables. Business investment is more a leading indicator, but still a major economic issue for Canada.
- Economic Issue #2: Increased cost of housing. Canadian housing costs in major cities has reached crisis levels even leading up to the pandemic. Our major cities like Toronto and Vancouver are some of the most unaffordable in the world. Most people who have been in Canada have seen housing in their cities go from achieveable-if-expensive (in major regions) to impossibly unaffordable. Most major cities now require 30+ of saving (at the average income) for a downpayment with a salary in the top 1% to purchase a home.
- Economic issue #3: Large inflation, combined with increased costs from consolidated markets with little competition. Not unlike other countries post-pandemic, but reports show major costs of living such as groceries have seen above-inflation levels of price increases due to industry consolidation. I.E. Many parts of Canada have one 2 major suppliers of grociers
- Immigration Issue #1: Non-permanent Residents. Canada has 2 classes of immigrants (aside from Refugees, whih make up a small number): Permanent Residents (PR's) and Non-permanent residents (NPR's). Our PR system is what is widely hailed as one of the best in the world and a point of Canadian pride. The NPR system has been substantially expanded under the Trudeau government and arguably exploited with millions of NPR's entering as temporary workers and university students. NPR's now consist of over 7% of the population (larger than then Indigenous population).
- Social Cohesion: most of Canada's public services (healthcare, teaching, even postal services, etc) have seen substantial degradation and a struggle to meet capacity.
- Lastly, it should be noted that Canada has tax system well above any US state. Historically, most Canadians have not have a problem with this because of the relative strength of our public institutions.
Current Issues facing the Goverment
- If the federal liberals have an election, they will lost most of their seats. They may even lose party status. They will likely avoid this at all costs.
- The federal NDP are not projected to lose seats, but will lose influence they gain by upholding the minority government. They gain little from a federal election.
- Given an early election is not likely and Trudeau is facing revolts internally (his key finance minister and deputy PM resigned publicly in the past few weeks), the choice is to stop parliment while they look for a new PM (trudeau may act as the interim). If they choose an existing MP for PM (maybe Freeland) they risk being associated with a deeply unpopular party. If they chose an outsider (like Mark Carney), they risk just as much backlash for an unelected PM.
Really appreciate the summary! As a Canadian these things feel very obvious but since most of this site is from the US this should help the conversation a lot.
> stimulus spending during the pandemic fueled the housing crisis
not very informed on canadian politics/economy so apologies if it is an obvious question, but what is the connection of stimulus spending and the housing crisis?
* Putting money directly in pockets tends to cause inflation in everything, but especially durable assets. Their relative worth increases compared to currency by simple supply and demand principle, because the supply of currency has increased.
* This sort of double-counts the same phenomenon, but stimulus is largely implemented via interest rate policy. When interest rates fall, people are more willing to pay higher prices for the big-ticket items that will be financed for many years (since the sticker price is offset by lower amortization costs; what people really care about is what their monthly bill will be after all the math is done).
* The pandemic itself directly motivated some demand for housing in smaller centers, as wealthy people got the idea that they could reduce their COVID risk by living somewhere less densely populated. This was also seen in the US e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/15/style/rich-people-fled-ne... . Even if they put up their city residences for sale at the same time, they'd have to find buyers. (Housing, as an asset, is not particularly liquid or fungible. While economists strongly agree that rent controls don't work and the way to solve the problem is to build more housing, it also needs to be housing in places where it actually helps. Which is realistically going to require major zoning reform - the simple existence of millions of square kilometers of undeveloped land isn't really relevant.)
This thread should be locked. It's unbelievable the BS being spewed by all sides of the political spectrum.
Ultimately, the Canadian democracy has wanted a new prime minister for years and it's abhorrent it has (and is) taking this long to let the citizens vote.
> Trudeau has also been friendly - and perhaps even submissive - to Xi Jinping
Gonna need to see a source on that. Canada even arrested Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou on behalf of the US on some made-up sanctions charges so that America could pressure the Chinese government in their trade war. The other part about Khalistan is a talking point from Modi's India, which has been busted for conducting assassinations against Khalistani activists in Canada and the US.
Constitutionalism is whatever, but it is interesting how much more dogmatically divided Canada seems to be getting under the decidedly more authoritarian administration of Trudeau. Everyone's worried about violence and terrorism but terrorists are a, semantically, political construct and a product of authoritarianism and inequality.
I wonder what this says about where the US is headed..........
Edit 2: you've posted 3 dozen comments in this thread, breaking the site guidelines left and right. WTF? I don't want to ban you (obviously, having cut you almost 10 years of slack already) but this is beyond the pale. You've been here for 12 years and ought to be a much better citizen of this place. First and foremost, that has to do with how you treat people (and positions) that you disagree with. If you want to keep posting to Hacker News, please fix this once and for all.
It's true that some of your 3 dozen comments in this thread were fine, but you were still breaking the site guidelines in many places. Here are some obvious examples:
No one who has read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and wants to use HN as intended should be posting such things. These are not borderline cases. The fact that some of your other posts were fine doesn't make it ok, any more than helping old ladies cross the street makes it ok to rob banks. I wish it were otherwise, but moderation has to go by bad deeds, not good deeds.
And those weren't the people that got their rights suspended by emergency powers, so what's your point?
According to that logic, the protestors during the Oka Crisis should've just been arrested, stripped of their rights and treated like non citizens since they were armed and threatened the police. Yet a better government back then realized that you can't just use emergency powers for every inconvenience, and didn't use them. They instead talked and engaged in discussions with them, which resolved the Oka Crisis peacefully.
Well, apart from the fighting and that young woman who was bayoneted while carrying her infant sister.
I’m not here to carry water for the asshat truckers, and I don’t understand the Canadian constitution or legal system, but the Oka Crisis was resolved with enough brutality for at least one crow pie.
It counts as farce. The law literally as passed states that the law itself is not capable of dealing with the situation, so it is law to deal with the situation.
It's a clear sign that your government is failing its responsibilities. The US has done it too.
Your government is with a straight face telling you that it doesn't legitimately have enough control over you so it needs to create extra-legal means of having control over you.
It's tyranny. There's a reason these acts only can get passed in war time. The population is too busy pissing its pants to realize when it's getting shafted.
I mean... The gold rush ended about 200 years ago but if you really think Dawson City is worth fighting NATO for, then I suppose that's a choice you can make.
Honestly, Canada merging with the US would not be a bad thing. There are articles discussing Canada joining the EU. What’s the difference between being a state within the US and a country that is basically a state, within the EU? A lot of Canada - especially outside of certain cities like Vancouver - share foundational values with the US much more so than the EU.
It's not just a meme. Well, the side-by-side comparison photos of Justin and Fidel are a meme in the widely spread sense. But it is a fact that in April 1971 the Trudeaus were a) in the Caribbean for two weeks and b) did not publish their schedule, including at least one visit to an undisclosed island. Justin was born in December 1971.
Add to that c) the remarkably familiar way Fidel, Pierre, and Margaret acted toward each other in Fidel's first official meeting with them in 1976, and d) Justin's remarkably laudatory statement on Fidel's death.
Why did you even click through? The title made it very clear this discussion was political. 29/30 of the stories on the HN front page are technical, click on those instead.
lol this incredible hyperbole begs for explanation.
The two main fumbles I can see of note are on housing and immigration.
On immigration the government only made remarkable changes in the last two years, and as if they touched a hot stove, they already realized their mistake and have already scaled back immigration numbers so much that Canada will effectively have nil immigration for the near future. Not likely a generational issue here.
On housing well I agree it'll take a generation to fix it but that was already the case before the Liberals took power. Very much an example of the future is already here but not yet distributed as Toronto and Vancouver were already experiencing a housing crisis in 2014.
Less an issue of what the libs actively did wrong but more an issue of how slow they were to act on the fact that Canada has had bad housing policy since the 1990s and few jurisdictions are taking things seriously. Fed housing policy at this instant is actually pretty good in that it is mirroring and supporting the good BC NDP housing policy. It'll take a long while though for homes to get built and likely things will get worse as the Conservatives scale back on investment.
One major change that happened with immigration is that the provinces (particularly - but not exclusively - Ontario) slashed funding for schools and encouraged them to make up for it by profiting off of a near infinite supply of foreign students.
Education is a provincial responsibility; the feds basically rubber stamped student visas, under the assumption that provinces were to be trusted for only accrediting responsible schools; schools that would import the best and brightest from around the world and train them to be valuable contributors to the country. That assumption faltered - instead, private strip-mall colleges began bringing in absolutely anybody with a pulse who could pay sky-high foreign tuition fees. Conestoga College in Kitchener-Waterloo, most notoriously, increased their foreign student enrollment by ~1500% - to nearly 30,000 students, 3/4 of the student population - putting enormous pressure on the city (which is not a very big city).
I think it's fair to blame the Libs for being asleep at the wheel while this happened, but I wish more ire was directed towards the provinces for this.
Isn’t the housing crisis caused at the local level? City officials control the permits/zoning.
> In 2020, Canada ranked 37 out of 38 for municipal approval process timeline in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). We're 3 times slower than the United States. This is due to restrictive zoning practices, excessive red tape, and outdated processes.
Absolutely, though the feds do have a significant impact via the tax code. The last period of time when lots of apartments were built in the 1960s-70s was a period of time when there was oodles of tax giveaways to apartment builders.
Additionally in that period the federal government was deeply involved in funding the development of publicly owned housing and coops. That ended in the late 80s and by the time of the main austerity budget of the Chretien Liberals in '93 the Feds were completely uninvolved in funding social housing.
So yeah a long period of nil social housing funding and few incentives to build housing and no real surprise that the country got to a point where it was severely underbuilding.
> On immigration the government only made remarkable changes in the last two years, and as if they touched a hot stove, they already realized their mistake and have already scaled back immigration numbers so much that Canada will effectively have nil immigration for the near future.
From government of Canada[1]:
> reducing from 500,000 permanent residents to 395,000 in 2025
> reducing from 500,000 permanent residents to 380,000 in 2026
> setting a target of 365,000 permanent residents in 2027
I don't know how that's "nil". The reduced numbers are still about 1% of Canada's population per year. Compare that to the us which had ~2.5 million immigrants or 0.7% of its population in 2022[2]. And most American seem to think that this is already too much.
There are a huge number of temporary residents in Canada, either as students, or on a post-graduation work permit, or as temporary foreign workers. By cutting back on these programs bringing in temporary residents, and also slashing the permanent resident intake, many of these temporary residents will need to leave. As such, the government is projecting a net decrease in population over the next two years.
ah yeah I see where I confused myself. From the links you posted, immigration still exists, but the numbers will be so low that population growth is nil. In fact the document asserts that Canada will see a decrease in population. Unless "marginal" population is some specific variant of phrase that means something beyond the ~41M population number?
> The 2025–2027 Immigration Levels Plan is expected to result in a marginal population decline of 0.2% in both 2025 and 2026, before returning to a population growth of 0.8% in 2027.
The more relevant thing beyond the permanent resident numbers is the temporary numbers which are also being severely cut. Often a PR is someone who has already been in the country for quite some time whereas a temporary resident would be a new immigrant.
canada got to the point that they can't turn off the immigration faucet, they need it for their economy to survive, but people have come to hate it so much that they can't maintain it, they're in for a collapse because of it
> people have come to hate it so much that they can't maintain it, they're in for a collapse because of it
Considering how post-Brexit Britain panned out, the people in charge of policy will be pragmatic and allow immigration to resume just to prevent immediate collapse under their watch, even if re-opening the immigration gates is unpopular.
By scaling back and "living like college students" (living like families in most of the world except the US & Canada), they're going to be the only groups of people who have any buying power to buy new homes when they finally get constructed. Meanwhile y'all will continue bitching and moaning about how fucked you are while the immigrant generation laughs their way to comfortable retirement and a better future for their children in your country.
I think this is a pretty unsupportable position, even if you passionately and emotionally make a case for this with constructed evidence, it's still not a tenable position. I think you have an easier time making the case for a flat earth, quite frankly.
Can you elaborate or be more concrete in what you mean by this?
Mostly partisan propaganda. The "Canada is broken" slogan is by no means organic; it is a carefully executed propaganda piece. The conservative leader is very good with punch lines and communication in general (and is maybe a bit too proud of it - e.g. he has a "Justinflation" plaque in his office; a term that he coined).
There are problems and people want them fixed. That is always the case. In a short couple of years Canada will suddenly not be broken anymore, as everyone will forget the slogan. Then in a few more years the next opposition will decry how awful things are, etc. It is all very predictable and clear.
I feel like its sentiment like this why the liberal party is heading for a historic collapse.
"Everything is fine, just cancel disney+"
Like young people are struggling... really badly and it seems like the government has done everything they can to make it worse.
Most people I've met really don't Like Pierre Pollieve (myself included) but to say the current governments ineptness is propaganda is actually insane.
Well, that wasn't my comment at all. I was specifically stating that the "Canada is broken" rhetoric is largely propaganda. That is very different from saying "everything is fine".
Propaganda? I am the only one of my friend group with a house at 30 years old. Most have completely given up on home ownership, we just registered a 62B$ deficit and homelessness is the worse it's been in my living memory. Universities are balancing their budget by pumping their foreign student numbers and hospitals are so deep in the red access to a specialist for anything non life threathening like a dermatologist or allergologist puts you on a 22 months waiting list even with a physician recommandation...
Not sure what you definition of broken is, but considering our tax rate we are well within our rights to call it broken.
Society is fundamentally not serving the prosperity of its younger generations. That is true in both the US and Canada. The wealth transfer upwards across generations is a breakdown of the social contract.
Millenials and younger have a great point, even if they articulate it poorly, and are being completely ignored but can't be for much longer. These demographics are just now coming into their political agency...
Your comment and the sibling comment touch on more or less the same issue - "what does 'broken' mean?".
We all agree there are problems, but does that justify saying "Canada is broken"? You start by saying that the US shares an issue with Canada. So is the US also broken? The sibling comment mentions other social and financial problems. Can we categorically say that a specific country is "broken" if it faces those issues?
From my perspective, calling a country "broken" is a very categorical statement, bringing to mind failed states, coups etc. I'm sure (or rather, hopeful) that we can all agree this isn't the case of Canada. When people say "broken" in this context, it is much more in the sense of "my car has a broken fuel line" than a commentary on how Canada is a Libya-style failed nation-state.
So in essence, "Canada is broken" is really "things are less good than they could or should be". That is the essence of my initial post - there are problems, yes; but the slogan is mostly inaccurate, ergo propaganda.
The "Canada is broken" people would also benefit from broader perspectives. I've lived most of my life in a developing country in the global south, so living here and seeing your definition of "broken" is a bit bewildering. I haven't lived here long enough to have seen how wonderful things were in the past decades, though, so who knows.
I do think the "Canada is broken" slogan works because there are some concerning issues and trends, but people need to realize they're decades-old trends that present politicians had little to do with.
I worry about Canada, but I don't care much about Trudeau's involvement, nor do I think any politicians in the race can do much about it.
It's tricky. I don't want to contribute to propaganda at all, in part because I believe it's manufactured by and serves the conservatives primarily, and I don't see their leader as anything close to a solution. Yet I don't want to pretend things are fine. Our economy doesn't look like it's on the right track, and the underpinnings of it seem to be corroding and failing. We're a very extractive, resource-intensive economy with very few new ideas, very few inventive or innovative programs or people, and little potential for making sweeping changes.
So, broken? Not really, and not more than most places. Canada is still incredible in so many ways. But on a good track? Utilizing our potential? Will my kids experience as healthy of an economy and society as I did at their ages? It doesn't seem like it, no.
I think it is a big deal. In many countries, you see a centre politician do some very normal thing that gets disingenuous outrage from the right solely with the intention (and effect) of dragging the Overton window over. From there, it is lather, rinse, repeat. The biggest reason for this is because capital has most of the power, most of the news outlets and capital is, of course, conservative.
When things do swing the other way, it is muted. Can you say Biden is more left than Obama? Were Harris' policies to the left of Biden's? Is Starmer's labour party more left than Corbyn's? On the whole, no.
The ONE dreadful thing the Liberals did was to renege on their promise of electoral reform. All Westminster-style Parliaments are done a disservice by using First-past-the-post. Trudeau campaigned on replacing the system with proportional representation, but incumbents in Westminster governments will never change the system that made them win.
Most people turn to the Carbon Tax as an example, but the Carbon Tax is implemented in such a way that the average family receives MORE in quarterly rebates than what they PAY in Carbon taxes; it's only those with very high incomes who come close to losing money from the tax[1].
Then they'll point to the pandemic and tell you that the worst thing we've ever done as a nation is ask people to get vaccinated and wear a mask during a time where a (not actually) unprecedented virus was rampant. And somehow the virus is the incumbent's fault.
After that you'll be told that healthcare is crumbling under Trudeau. Healthcare in Canada is a provincial responsibility, and the vast majority of provinces (eg Alberta) are run by right-wing governments looking to profit from private healthcare, so are employing a starve-the-beast strategy to make private healthcare look attractive.
And then some particularly weird people will tell you he isn't tough enough on trans people.
What’s dreadful is the rising cost of living and lack of affordable housing, which he failed to address. Moreover he doubled immigration during a time when the average Canadian was struggling to keep up with rising expenses.
I’m pro-immigration but not at an unsustainable rate. Housing construction was not keeping up.
Trudeau pushed beyond the limits of pro-immigration policy. If it was just conservative propaganda, the liberals wouldn’t be looking at a potentially historic election loss based on current polling.
That said, I don’t think conservatives will fix anything.
The immigration system we use today was set up by Harper. I'm an immigrant myself, having moved here on a Harper scheme, but under Trudeau.
You are absolutely right that this wasn't addressed by the current government, but it is a policy of the previous one. The only reason he alone is being blamed is because he happened to be in charge for a very long time.
It is likely to remain unaddressed satisfactorily under PP, too, since landlords benefit from immigration (especially high turnover immigration) and his primary interest is landlords and business owners.
This is a symptom of FPTP-based Westminster governments. If we had a more equitable electoral system, the blame can be more appropriately distributed and - even better - the issues can be addressed more efficiently.
> The only reason he alone is being blamed is because he happened to be in charge for a very long time.
No, he was in charge when it got bad. A policy that doesn't harm the country one decade can harm the country the next. And it did, so the one who chose not to repeal it, and rather to make it much worse, gets blamed.
Asking as a non-Canadian: What do you think he could have done that would fix these issues? If there is a clear path, why is it not politically attractive?
Universities have been abusing the temporary student visa as an income stream. The universities are awash with temporary foreign students, being charged higher tuition fees than domestic students. Partly this is greed, but it's also because funding for post-secondary has been getting cut in most provinces. BUT AGAIN - post-secondary funding is a provincial issue, not something the federal government (ie Trudeau) can do much about.
Alberta, for example, cut post-secondary funding, so the universities in Alberta turned to foreign students to make up the shortfall. This increased rental demand A LOT.
The issues were self created by skyrocketing the immigration rates / TFWs.
All they had to do was .... nothing, just keep the system as it was.
With that it seems like there has been a lot of heavy lobbying by companies built on low wage employment to deflate wages across the country. And it worked!
They rapidly expanded the LMIA program which provisions visas for primarily low income work.
Additionally they realllly expanded the international student visa pool, without actually checking who they were granting visas to.
The result was that pretty much non existent colleges were created with the sole goal of allowing people to pay for a backdoor to try and get PR without high level education, skills or even language proficiency.
Lastly there used to be a cap on visas issued based an unemployment rate of 6% they removed that cap so despite unemployment being up to around 10% in major cities they are still granting tons of visas.
So yeah... They really went out of their way to expand the visa program as fast as possible with very little oversight.
Additionally in terms of actual background checks, those seemed to go out the door as Canada in the past few years has given PR to a number of people who are actively wanted terrorists as part os Isis and other terror groups
- housing costs have skyrocketed and econmic growth has been lackluster
-- more importantly liberals have failed to articulate a convincing plan on this
- conservatives have been wildly succesful in the polls,causing the liberal party to fragment internally, which just further makes them look like they dont know what they are doing.
- trudeau has been in power a long time, people want change
- across the globe incumbants are having problems.
In terms of the grandparent, i don't really think there is much damage. I guess there is a high budget deficit. Not sure what that poster is referring to.
For the commenters that think this is hyperbole, here is my counter argument:
Inflation is a generational issue because prices have gone up and has made all Canadians poorer and this won't be undone until we have deflation (via a recession? more pain) or until wages increase faster than inflation does.
What are the chances we have deflation? Not likely when our Canadian Dollar is being devalued and Bank of Canada continues to decrease interest rates. Costs more and more for Canadians to import goods.
What would trigger wages or savings to increase beyond inflation in Canada at this point? All foreign investment has dried up. It will take many years to make Canada attractive again to foreigners and years before companies mobilize to come back. Maybe more export of oil and gas via pipeline or LNG terminals would help but that is not popular (Keystone XL is dead).
Out of control gov't spending (which has fed inflation) has cause gov't debt to sky rocket. This will take a generation to fix. First the new Conservative Gov't will have to get into power, then significantly cut spending (if they can). Reduction of gov't spending will reduce the economy (more pain).
If gov't is cutting spending, how will our medical system get better? It'll actually will get worse than it already is (more pain).
Immigration has caused rent and housing prices to go up. How long will this take to fix? We're not deporting anyone. Building new houses needs people who can afford new houses... did I mention inflation has made people poorer? How about a housing correction/crash (more pain)?
The damage that Trudeau has caused isn't done yet, even after he resigns. We're in for more pain.
Inflation has been present in every country on the planet. It's not much different in Canada than elsewhere.
There's a bit of a debate going on about how much carbon pricing ("tax") has effected food prices, with some claiming it has been a lot, but Canadian prices are about at the same (higher) level as the US and other places:
Inflation would have been less if there was less immigration, less gov't spending, less tax... all of which Trudeau actively increased.
Consumption taxes, such as carbon taxes, are actually OK if you reduce the income taxes to offset. Consumption taxes can change behavior vs. a blanket income tax. (Inexplicably, he reduced GST (another consumption tax)... so he's not thinking deeply about tax theory or anything at all really)
Trudeau planned to continue to increase carbon taxes by 200% higher than they are today. Also compare gasoline prices from the US to Canada.
This can't be emphasized enough. Canada has the highest household debt in the G7. There are no viable customers.
The only hope that you really have is something you're already doing -- mass immigration -- with all of the tradeoffs that come with it. Canada has to make a _fundamental_ change to get out of its current situation.
> This is what happens when NPCs try to become scientific experts based on random podcasts.
Attacking others will get you banned here, regardless of how right you are or feel you are.
It's also in your interest to edit swipes out of your comments here, quite apart from not getting banned on HN, because they discredit your position in the eye of the fair-minded reader (see https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... for lots of past explanations of that, if you care).
I had to sign a waiver absolving the government and vaccine makers of liability to get the vaccine that was required to keep my job. The vaccine I chose ended up getting pulled from the market due to the risk of blood clots. We now have the benefit of hindsight, but the authoritarian bent many governments gained during Covid should not be forgotten.
I did source it, I just didn't provide links this time. Go dig out the old UK or danish reports or discussions of them from the time.
No links this time because I've posted on this topic dozens of times in the past over the years and was away from my bookmarks list at the time anyway. It didn't stop people flagging posts. They just pick fights with the sources or start making arguments long since resolved. There are whole websites devoted to explaining various aspects of what happened, look for Prof Norman Fenton's blog for an example if you want to get started.
Not going to go and try to unearth it right now but everything he is saying about the figures coming out of England & Scotland is absolutely true, I saw it laid out on Twitter with links to the primary sources in real time.
I think my favorite trick here was categorizing people less than four weeks out from their second dose, or anyone who didn't get a second dose (likely as a result of a nasty reaction to the first shot, itself a good indicator of high susceptibility to COVID spike pathology), or anyone whose vaccine status was "unknown," as "unvaccinated."
Nothing will change because no Canadian government will lower house prices and that's what absolutely needs to happen.
2024 was a banner year for voting against the incumbent governments worldwide. Globally we have a cost-of-living crisis, a housing affordability crisis and a years-long decrease in the standard-of-living. Generally speaking, each country has 3 forces that are in play:
1. Progressives;
2. Neoliberals / centrists; and
3. Outright fascists.
The French election was a prime example of how this plyas out. Macron, a centrist, very much sided with the fascists rather than the progressives, such as who he picked to be Prime Minister after the snap election he called.
Some say the UK is an outlier with Labor winning a massive victory. It is not. The former Labor leader, Jeremy Corbyn, was weakened by a divided electorate so he could be character-assassinated in a coordinated campaign alleging anti-semitism to be replaced by a neoliberal centrist (Keir Starmer). Starmer actually got significantly fewer votes than Corbyn did in his two elections. All that happened was the right-wing vote got split between Conservatives and Reform.
The US election played out similarly. Despite evidence of Biden's cognitive decline being apparent as early as of Spring 2021, he ran for reelection and was supported by the Democratic establishment right up until a disastrous debate performance made clear his position was untenable. Nancy Pelosi reportedly wanted an open primary at the convention. Instead Kamala Harris was anointed as the Democratic establishment feared a progressive candidate would win a primary.
So we got a Wall Street approved centrist neoliberal platform that disrupted nothing and gave absolutely nothing to working people and had a policy platform on many issues (eg the death penalty, Israel-Palestine, immigration, deregulation) with almost no daylight between it and the Trump platform.
Unsurprisingly that platform lost, badly. Predictably.
The point here is that in every election, neoliberals are way more comfortable with (and will side with) fascists than leftists or pgoressives.
Voters, eager for change, will choose populism because they aren't being offered any alternative. But nobody wants to address the root causes here: housing unaffordability and massive wealthy inequality.
Too many people are invested in their house as an investment, as their nest-egg. House prices absolutely have to come down and nobody wants to hear that. Canada is a real estate bubble, just like pretty much every other Western nation.
People will cling to their house prices as society crumbles around them.
> Canada is a real estate bubble, just like pretty much every other Western nation
Exacerbated by the fact opportunities limited to a few geographic hotspots.
100 million Canadians is not a bad idea once it starts developing other urban centres. But the first 20 million is going to try their hardest to shitup the GTA.
You say this like it's a given, but I'm not so sure anymore. The word fascist has lost most of its meaning by being applied to everyone from Donald Trump to J. K. Rowling. Can you explain specifically what you mean by this?
One steelman might be to replace "fascist" by "Malthusian populist", eg: someone who wants to decrease the national population of nonwealthy people to place less strain on what they see as a fixed pie of resources for the remaining "first-class" population.
While there is disagreement on the exact definition, Wikipedia sums it up pretty well [1]:
> Fascism is a far-right, authoritarian, and ultranationalist political ideology and movement,[1][2][3] characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation or race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy
A good litmus test is to simply see how many parallels you can draw to Nazi Germany. So let's take a few points in relation to Trump:
- "far right": the attack on the bodily autonomy of women, attacks on LGBTQ (particularly T) people, etc
- "authoritarian": Hitler was elected (technically appointed) Chancellor before becoming a dictator. Trump was elected but it really took the Supreme Court to completely invent the idea of presidential immunity to make that happen. There is absolutely no constitutional basis for that decision. This, and various political moves to argue more power should be held by the executive, gets wrapped up in a psuedo-intellectual veneer like "unitary executive theory" [2];
- "ultranationalist": we just had an election campaign of outright race-baiting and villification not seen since 1930s Germany. It will be official government policy to build concentration camps and to use the military to round up undesirables;
- "belief in a antural hierarchy": well, that's just white supremacy.
As another parallel, it's worth noting that many on the right will argue that we need to root out "cultural Marcists" [3], which is eerily similar to Nazi-era "cultural Bolshevism" [4].
Another Nazi-era conspiracy is the Great Replacement [5], which has been resurgent in the last few years (eg [6]).
This isn't unique to the US as you'll see all of these traits in other countries (eg Reform in UK, AfD in Germany, National Rally in France).
Fun fact: one of National Front's founders (Petain) signed the armistice with Nazi Germany in 1940 so collaborated with Hitler as Vichy France [7].
No government lowers housing prices. Additionally real estate rarely drops in price unless there is a major economic downturn. It isn't going to happen.
>Voters, eager for change, will choose populism because they aren't being offered any alternative. But nobody wants to address the root causes here: housing unaffordability and massive wealthy inequality.
Well then, frankly, given your apparent learning, try encouraging progressives to actually address the root causes, rather than constantly spouting progressive-sounding apologia for them. Not to tell you in another country how your politics works, but I know that in the United States and in some other countries I'm acquainted with, the progressive base in major cities are, if anything, even more attached to their housing nest-eggs than the homeowner/smallholder classes in smaller cities and more conservative states. This preference is visible in the differences of housing policy and rents between, say, California and Texas.
Trudeau has been unpopular for years and hideously unpopular for the past couple of months, mostly as a result of the current state of things being bad (and as they've been in power for nearly 10 years, they already cop the blame for that), not hypothetical future bad things.
It wouldn't be a conspiracy, just strategic thinking.
It wouldn't be the first time in history where one party/group/individual decides to relinquish power anticipating some crisis:
- Sulla was a dictator who retired before the collapse of the Roman republic.
- The British handed over power to India before the communal violence escalated.
- Nixon resigned to avoid the spectacle of impeachment.
Someone in power may be able to better see some things inevitably coming and bail out sooner to avoid the worse.
You said Trudeau was unpopular for years and yet only now he's leaving.
>You said Trudeau was unpopular for years and yet only now he's leaving.
There's unpopular and then there's unpopular.
His approval rating has dropped off a cliff over the past year. His cabinet ministers have been resigning and/or openly criticizing him / asking for him to step down to save their own political careers.
This article is from last September - 4 months ago.
>> Darrell Bricker, a political scientist and pollster with Ipsos, compared the current moment in Canadian politics to this summer’s historic defeat of the UK Tories, who lost 251 seats in British parliament.
>>“It’s basically over,” said Mr Bricker of Trudeau’s government in an interview with the BBC.
>>“All that is happening is sands sliding out of the sand dial, and we’re working our way towards an inevitable conclusion.”
>>Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada faced the stiffest challenge to his leadership from fellow elected Liberal Party members on Wednesday during a closed-door meeting where he was urged to resign to avoid torpedoing the party’s chances in the next election.
>>For more than a year, the Liberals under Mr. Trudeau have trailed the Conservative Party by double digits in polls, suggesting that the Liberal Party could face a crushing defeat in the next election, which must be held by next October.
>>Panic within the party intensified after the Liberals recently lost two special parliamentary elections in districts that had been considered their strongholds.
>>The growing dissatisfaction played out on Wednesday, when most of the 153 Liberal members of Parliament gathered in Ottawa for a scheduled caucus meeting.
>>While caucus proceedings are typically secret, Mr. Trudeau, according to Canadian news media citing unnamed sources, was presented with a letter signed by about two dozen caucus members calling on him to step down.
>>The letter has been circulating for several days, but has been a closely held secret.
>>About 20 Liberal members criticized Mr. Trudeau’s leadership after the letter was read aloud during the three-hour-and-17-minute meeting, according to Canadian news outlets.
Months? Well, only if you mean 120 months. The guy managed to destroy the best country in the world, leaving it with no foreseeable way back. Maybe joining the US is the only option now.
I don’t know if it is about blame for the other side, but I can see Trudeau being a scapegoat for all of Canada’s problems. I DO think he is responsible for a lot of Canada’s problems in the cultural side, especially as it affects politics. But the laws and realities of governing the country are also the fault of legislators who in turn are voted in by people. So to me what I view this as, is people rejecting the current highly progressive order of things in Canada but also the left leaning side of Canada’s politics ejecting Trudeau as a way to not bring blame onto the rest of the party and its politicians.
Hanlon's Razor seems to fit too well IMHO. Assuming malice is a hard one to swallow when the evidence of bad decision-making is everywhere to see. To be on purpose for example you would have to assume that the hordes of people inside and outside the administration and the media all conspired to cover up Biden's deteriorating state, with the knowledge (or high probability) that he would lose in the first debate and step down without giving Harris enough time (or whatever theory you believe to explain why she lost). Just that portion alone is quite hard to believe IMHO.
The entire market is due for major correction. I’m delighted I get to blame it on conservatives when it happens. It was probably inevitable, no matter what party is in power. That’s just how it is when you get two standard deviations away from the mean.
All: if you're going to post in this thread, please make sure you're up-to-date on the site guidelines and that you're following them: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. That means erring on the side of following them, since they're easy to break unintentionally.
Quite a few accounts who have been here for many years have been breaking the guidelines rather shamefully in this thread. That's dismaying. If established users can't set a good example for others, what chance does this community have? If Hacker News is interesting enough to keep coming back to for years, you owe it to your fellow members not to contribute to destroying it.
p.s. We changed the URL from https://www.bbc.com/news/live/clyjmy7vl64t. Interested readers might want to look at both.
Patio11 has some good coverage of Trudeau's handling of the trucker protest against the government's handling of COVID-19 [1].
Whatever you think of the truckers' position or protest tactics, any punishment for their actions ought to go through the laws and court system. Trudeau instead essentially told the banking system "You can't do business with those people, they're terrorists." Patio11's words of what happened next:
"The assistant deputy finance minister...said...'The intent was not to get at the families', and when a democratic government starts a sentence that way something deeply #*&$#ed up has happened."
I'm not on the pulse of Canadian politics, so I don't really know what sins or political circumstances have led Trudeau to this point, or if he has any redeeming qualities. Personally, I'm glad to see him gone.
[1] https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/debanking-and-debunki...
(You'll have to Ctrl+F trucker as this blog doesn't seem to have <a name> for headings, as is customary on e.g. Wikipedia.)
> […] ought to go through the laws and court system.
The Emergencies Act is part of the laws of Canada:
* https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/e-4.5/
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergencies_Act
And there were court orders:
* https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-60356461
* 2022 ONSC 1001: https://www.canlii.org/en/on/onsc/doc/2022/2022onsc1001/2022... ; https://www.attorneygeneral.jus.gov.on.ca/english/docs/ISSUE...
And the court of law later determined that this was an abuse of power and unlawful. The fact that there is an existing law that can be abused does not negate the argument that abusing it is unlawful.
> And the court of law later determined […]
And an Act-mandated commission said it was warranted:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_Order_Emergency_Commiss...
On April 25, 2022, Prime Minister Trudeau selected Rouleau to be the commissioner of the Public Order Emergency Commission inquiry into the invocation of the Emergencies Act, which had occurred in response to the 2022 Canada convoy protest.
~ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Rouleau
That is one step removed from Trudeau investigating himself, we're not talking the gold standard of systemic independence here.
Each political side loves laws like this until the other side gets in power.
That's the bigger picture problem with Canada (and nearly every place else). Our laws assume the government is the good guy, when they should be assuming the government is public enemy number one.
[dead]
[dead]
That sounds a bit like "The police carefully investigated themselves and firmly established that no abuse or wrongdoing took place".
I've read this comment multiple times and now I'm greatly confused because it does not appear to be meant humorously.
At some point in history it was legal to own slaves ...
The law is a tool for the service of a community, not the other way around.
And in the Canadian system, are appointed commissions or judicial rulings supreme and overriding over the other?
In common law systems it is part of government review and is not meant to be a ruling on events already happened.
iirc the finding was that it was within the power of the province to handle the situation.
The thing is, the province wasn't using the powers it had to handle it. The situation was obviously an emergency. You can't just let a convoy of heavy vehicles occupy your national capital indefinitely and say "not a problem, the provincial govt could theoretically handle this"
I'm not sure the Quebec kidnappings would have met the threshold either. There's a strong argument to be made that the law around the emergencies act is a bad law.
The court's finding meant ANY emergency powers would have failed to meet the standard.
It may have been an emergency in the first days with the honking. That largely stopped after a week or so.
They switched to camping in front of the parliament with bouncy castles etc.
The bridge that was occupied in another province was cleared.
I'm really not under the impression that at the time they went in there was any emergency. It was ugly: Peaceful unarmed protesters in pedestrian zones with no trucks in sight were pushed back by squads with assault rifles and loud tear gas grenades. People with assault rifles stormed delivery vans.
The narrative at the time was that of a huge "far right" (what a surprise ...) conspiracy. No proof has ever emerged, it was just an abuse of power of the "left" who were at the peak of their power back then.
Good riddance, Trudeau.
I see a lot of posts like this, and this is straight up disinformation. I'm not assuming it's willful, since disinformation breeds disinformation, but here's my account as someone who lives here and is glad Trudeau resigned.
The idea that it was a few days of honking then bouncy castles is nonsense. It was an extended occupation of the downtown of the capital. Endless trucks and other vehicles, many with their wheels removed, back-to-back fully blocking a large section of the downtown for weeks. Yes, honking – and loud truck air horns.
There really was chaos downtown, and not the hand-wringing "poop in the street in SF" type. And a lot of it did have right wing vibes. Examples: A well known café had its large window with a LGBTQ illustration smashed. There was while when emergency workers needed escort downtown because of racist abuse. (I was downtown, I heard and saw a ton myself.) Just incredibly dumb stuff: A soup kitchen was intimidated and raided.
And yes, it was financially supported by the "right", including a lot of American money.
Yes, there was a site with bouncy castles and kids playing, but that's obviously not a problem. There's protest in Ottawa all the time, and it's sometimes inconvenient, and that's life in the capital.
The last straw for me wasn't even the chaos in Ottawa, but the protest shutting down the Ambassador bridge in Windsor. That's really bad. Ontario's auto sector is huge, and the perceived reliability and predictability of the flow of intermediate goods across the border is everything to that sector. Interrupting it has an enormous immediate and ongoing economic impact. (I'm not sure where you get your information, but the bridge is also in Ontario.)
None of that is to say that the emergencies act was the right tool. My fairly uninformed impression is that there were tools short of the act that should have been used.
But it's frustrating seeing disinformation and revisioning like this stand. Please reconsider whatever news sources are providing you with this false information.
So you support abusive authoritarianism, but only when it's from your side?
I really don't. I wasn't in support of vaccine mandates and passports, and agreed with some of the truckers demands because in a democracy the bar for protecting personal autonomy and freedom should be incredibly high.
But I also think it's not an unreasonable point to disagree on. There are cases where we curtail freedom for emergencies. That's just a fact. That doesn't mean believing in authoritarianism. And, especially early in the pandemic, there was a lot of uncertainty about how apocalyptic it was going to be.
Flip side, since the mass vaccination has been incredibly valuable, policies that undermine public trust in vaccination hurt us as a society down the line and the bar should be particularly high for them! It's often said the most valuable tool for epidemiology is public trust.
The whole thing was idiotic. There was already a public discussion about when the vaccine mandate for truck drivers was going to be removed. There was plenty of of ground for more useful discussion.
So, to answer your question:
> So you support abusive authoritarianism
Great question, but no I do not. I think the government overreacted (too coercively). The freedom convoy, however was a real problem that needed ending. If that sounds like abusive authoritarianism to you, I'd invite you to share your opinion about traffic signs, prohibitions against cannibalism, and publicly funded hospitals.
yea if you ignore the public shitting, public pissing, drunkenness, the harassment of locals, then yea, it was only bouncy castles, or stuff like this
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42613957
I guess you also think they should use the emergency act on the downtown east side of Vancouver then?
[dead]
If that is the worst complaint anyone had, that’s basically - any time there is a bunch of people around?
Are you describing the truckers?
Pissing and drunkenness a characteristics of nearly all western societies.
You could also drive around the bridge ...
Why does everyone have to suffer at the hands of a few?
Overwhelmingly Canadian's wanted the vehicles removed - I recall no public empathy. If not, there would have been overwhelming public outcry and a follow up larger movement protest that would have called for no-confidence motion in that moment.
If you're going to talk about the law then words absolutely matter:
Abusing a law is not by itself unlawful. You always need to actually do something unlawful.
An abhorrent part, abused way out of its intended scope in a totalitarian way.
As one of Stalin's right hand men once said: "Show me the man and I'll show you the crime."
[flagged]
> flip the sides, i.e. you've a conservative government and a liberal protesting organization, and I'll wait to see your reaction.
You mean like what the pro-Palestinian folks did at UofT (not far from where I work) in 2024 and who lost a court case (2024 ONSC 3755)? I was fine it.
Was also fine with the 'Occupy Toronto' folks losing their court case: 2011 ONSC 6862.
And as it stands, I live in Toronto, Canada, which does have a conservative government in the province who is doing all sorts of stupid things:
* https://environmentaldefence.ca/2024/11/20/ontario-governmen...
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8-1vT0TmQjs
What do either of the given examples given have to do with the Emergencies Act of freezing someone out of banking? Being kicked off university property is not the same thing as having your financial life frozen by the feds.
The organizers of one of the vancouver pro-palestine protests was designated a terrorist group. I assume that causes bank account freezes.
> You mean like what the pro-Palestinian folks did at UofT (not far from where I work) in 2024 and who lost a court case (2024 ONSC 3755)? I was fine it.
How many of the UofT protestors were de-banked? There's a vast difference between having tents removed from a public space, and being cut off from essential parts of modern life. You can't pay insurance with cash. You can't have a regular phone contract. You may not even be able to have home internet. Someone who is debanked effectively becomes a different caste of person, one who is prohibited from most institutions and services.
You're comparing apples to oranges by comparing the treatment of the trucker protests and the campus occupiers.
like a illegal immigrant?
> You mean like what the pro-Palestinian folks
How many of these were "de-banked"?
Yes, and I live in the same city as well, and I'll agree with you that both Conservatives and Liberals have made things worse for us at different levels of the government.
[flagged]
Personal attacks will get you banned here, no matter how wrong someone else is or you feel they are.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
It's not a partisan issue.
The Charter is pretty clear on the limitations placed on protests.
If those truckers had dispersed within a day they would have been fine.
But they were accepting donations and foreign money in order to stay encamped and had no intention of dispersing.
Then arrest them. Debanking should be illegal. It denies you the right to do anything in the current age.
Do you mean debanking by the government, or for any reasons?
(Because banks will already algorithmically drop you as a customer without explanation or recourse, akin to how you can get your Google account algorithimically banned. TBH it would be more of an inconvenience to have my Google account banned than one of my bank accounts.)
> TBH it would be more of an inconvenience to have my Google account banned than one of my bank accounts.
Congratulations, you're in an extremely privileged segment of society. Most of those truckers would likely find it easier to relate to a little green Martian in a flying saucer than to you.
Do you think banking is a charter right? Really confused.
The banks can already choose not to do business with you for any reason or no reason at all. It’s in the pamphlets they give when you open an account.
[flagged]
> address a virus that in no way constituted an emergency
100s of thousands hospitalised. 60k dead. And that is with lockdowns.
Seems like an emergency to me.
There is a backlash against COVID actions that is happening now, is because people are terrible at math and worse at assessing risk. The idea that COVID was not a valid emergency is pure historical revisionism with no base in fact or data.
Public opinion polls consistently showed widespread overestimation of personal COVID risk across the political spectrum, and the policy response of reaching for poorly studied therapies and NPIs reflected this.
Yup. Like orders and orders of magnitude off. People thought they’d have like a 10% of dying if they caught Covid when it was closer to 0.2% (and much less when you stratify by risk conditions).
Public health did absolutely nothing to calm the public. In fact they intentionally stoked the panic fires and caused people to absolutely lose their minds.
7 million people have died from COVID so far.
And that is with the biggest lockdowns seen in human history.
It's ridiculous to me that people seem to downplay the severity.
Your numbers can be true but it is also true that those “biggest lockdowns in human history” didn’t do anything to change those numbers, nor were they ethical or moral. Humans can’t stop a respiratory virus like that—it was wishful thinking at best and peak human arrogance at worst.
And even if they could probably do something significant, that doesn’t mean humans have the right to do so. Those lockdowns and mandates were incredibly destructive to our communities, our children, our elders, and ourselves. They violated our inalienable human rights. They transferred immense wealth from the poor to the rich. And they didn’t do a single fucking thing but take a bad problem and make it exponentially worse.
Many things can be true at once.
> but it is also true that those “biggest lockdowns in human history” didn’t do anything to change those numbers
Wrong. Here is a meta study which found that 79% of studies determined that lockdowns substantially reduced transmission:
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10446910
What was the upshot/benefit of this "reduced transmission" which was purchased at enormous cost? Everyone eventually got COVID anyway. How many deaths were actually prevented rather than delayed?
There will be no answer to that. These experts played fast and loose with the data and honestly I don’t trust any of it.
And honestly the Science and Data really doesn’t matter. It was unethical and immoral to boot. Even if it had legitimate science and data backing it doesn't mean it was the right thing to do.
People try to drag us into the weeds with their “studies” and “papers” and links to half-assed broken data sources to derail us… the more powerful argument is from ethics and morals. And from plain old common sense, really.
I don’t even think they are being intentional. As I said elsewhere people went feral and shut off the critical thinking and intellectual curiosity parts of their brain. They’ll latch onto any scary data or paper that attempts to validate / rationalize their crazy behavior. It’s just basic human stuff.
> And honestly the Science and Data really doesn’t matter
> shut off the critical thinking and intellectual curiosity parts
Seems like you should be directing this comment at yourself.
By the time most people in Canada got COVID, they were already vaccinated. That was the whole point of limiting transmission. The let it rippers were saying that the old people should just stay in their retirement homes, not understanding that most people at high risk live with others who are working or are working themselves.
There are literally billions of other problems in society beyond “reducing covid transmission”. Lockdowns forced a myopic focus on exactly one problem to the exclusion of virtually all other problems.
Why was “reducing transmission” so much more important than providing children a sanctuary from abusers at home by way of open schools? Why was “reducing transmission” a greater problem to solve for than “elderly dying alone in an assisted living facility”.
Your study is a perfect example of the extremely myopic focus on COVID. It was as if absolutely nothing else was allowed to be a priority.
Also I’m curious, if this paper is true why did Florida or Sweden not have dead bodies lining the streets? They either ended their lockdowns earlier than most or didn’t have them at all? Did Florida feed them all to the gators? Was there a hidden “mass death” in Sweden I wasn’t aware of?
Or perhaps is “reduced transmission” not a good metric?
I ran my personal risk profile through qcovid.org and it spat out a 1 in 80,000 chance of death and 1 in 3,000 chance of hospitalization. Any notion of taking a rush-to-market vaccine went out the window at that point. And before someone says "well what about your obligations to others?", my obligation was to my kids, to stay healthy and able to earn a living.
Fun fact: according to this article posted on HN today 1.1 million people in the US wind up in the emergency room from stair related injuries (https://www.axios.com/2025/01/05/elevators-escalators-regula...).
Big numbers always sound big until they get put into context. All of the media and fearmongering public health “experts” loved to drop big numbers devoid of any context.
At times it was as though people believed no one had ever died before COVID, and never would die if only they could indefinitely avoid catching it.
Right? Like these people forgot their own mortality or something.
I swear it was like something took a stick blender to people’s head and spun it around a bit. Some of the smartest people I knew absolutely lost their mind. They turned into feral animals, and I mean that in a very literal sense.
…and the worst part is they were encouraged to act that way by The Experts. Good news is as verboten. Only bad news was allowed.
> I swear it was like something took a stick blender to people’s head and spun it around a bit.
This is exactly what happened. Case counter chyrons on TV news, the Google tools where you could look it up for your own region, the videos of people collapsing in the street that were broadcast on social media platforms by government accounts -- it was all calculated to inculcate hysterical fear of the virus in order to jumpstart agendas that it enabled.
Honestly I think it was a massive, classic engineering disaster. It was multiple failures happening all at once that lead to the disaster that was humans response to Covid.
Everybody played to their incentives and this was the outcome. There was nothing done and no process or source of trust that could calm the masses and inject some kind of counter “antidote” to the hysteria. It ran unchecked.
The already repealed, provincial vaccine mandates they were protesting.
A liberal protesting organization would have used bicycles and would thus have been legal.
No, they would have been mainly on foot. I know this because it's actually happened, repeatedly, with BLM, in both Canada and the US. One random Canadian example: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/black-lives-matter-pr...
Blocking traffic is still blocking traffic, though. In Canada, the "notwithstanding clause" essentially means no rights are absolute. Intentionally blocking traffic on highways here is generally illegal, insofar as people have a lawful right to drive there normally; see e.g. https://mtplaw.com/legal-news/arrests-for-blocking-a-highway... - and generally there will be clear evidence that such blockages are intentional.
Also relevant: https://edmonton.ctvnews.ca/can-protesters-be-charged-for-bl... ; https://ccla.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/Know-Your-Rights... (PDF from the Canadian Civil Liberties Association).
Not if the squeezed their bike horns and rang their bells at all hours of the night, and threatened the locals.
A good parallel is the U.S. campus protests in opposition to military aid for Israel's Gaza campaign, which were violently dispersed. You can find lots of instances of mostly right wingers saying they should never be able to get a job again and such.
That was Bill Ackman. There were also right wingers like Candace Owens who took a stand against it. It’s inaccurate to say that every person on the right was agreeing with that statement.
They were not a "protesting" organization, they were an organized armed group with plans to attack the parliament, that's when they got taken down.
> armed group with plans to attack the parliament
This is a very strong allegation, and one I'd suggest backing up with sources if you want to make it.
I think it’s worth noting that the weekend before this, local residents of Ottawa had basically “stormed” one of the trucker convoy camps to unblock a road. There were genuine concerns that the residents of Ottawa were ready to take matters into their own hands, and it would be a bloodbath. Not to mention the blockade in Alberta where they were found with guns and a pipe bomb, with their communications indicating they were planning to murder the RCMP officers on site!
Declaring the Emergency acts was overwhelmingly popular in Canada and remains one of the most popular things Trudeau ever did. The moves to restrict access to banking affected less than 20 people (and I think they were generally funnelling money from international propaganda groups or committing similar financial crimes).
I was a resident of downtown Ottawa during this period. It was bad. We had a young kid and didn't feel even safe walking her to a park, because the route crossed over convoy lines and there were all sorts of stories of harassment and assaults. We didn't even experience the worst of it; lots of people dealt with truck horns blaring 24/7, but at least our street at least was kept clear as an emergency route.
We put up with the occupation for about two weeks, but we saw a steady escalation and decided to leave town. We stayed with family for two weeks until the convoy was cleared.
I'm very proud of the residents who were brave enough to put up a resistance (the so-called "Battle of Billings Bridge"), and I'm appalled by the response by the local police and the province. I absolutely believe the federal government made the correct choice, and this was proven out in the public hearing after the fact on the use of the Emergency Act.
Its interesting how as of late the working-class's totally self-sabatoging ways of protesting almost universally piss off their fellow men and women, rather than taking their grievances to the powers that support them.
All of the protests I see lately, besides strikes, are college students. Which working class protests are you thinking of?
There's been massive popular protests in France, Germany and Great Britain in the past few years. Maybe in more countries? But they don't always get media coverage. One that you should have heard of is the yellow vest protests in France.
Im French, my anecdotal opinion is the same as the Canadian parent comment: they block and destroy, propose nothing realistic and end up pissing everyone off. I vote Macron as a result.
basic hotel strikes around SF are focused on bullying customers
Aren't that the only forms of protest that are allowed?
If I remember properly, offering the service for free (for instance in public transport) bear the risk of being held personally responsible of any damage or accident that would happen to anyone (which is not unlikely if you factor in provocations)
no one cares about how the food arrives to their plate, only that it's there.
[dead]
Stories of harassment and assaults? Provide one source for any assault.
Glad you asked.
* Pushing a reporter live on air: https://x.com/mylenecrete/status/1494874304814751744
* Beating a counter-protestor on camera: https://x.com/timabray/status/1488231660260839430?t=Bx4fGVxR...
* Attacking a shop employee for masking up on their way to work: https://www.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=23006638534070...
* Smashing windows of a business with a Pride flag: https://imgur.com/a/80bmPQ8
* Trying to handcuff shut the doors of an apartment building: https://x.com/gray_mackenzie/status/1492705868697198593
* Encouraging harassment of the lawyer leading the class action lawsuit against them: https://www.facebook.com/groups/217129079397701/permalink/62...
* Threatening public officials: https://www.ottawapolice.ca/Modules/News/index.aspx?newsId=7...
* Spamming emergency services so they could not be used: https://x.com/OttawaPolice/status/1491788988654383115
* Harassing children at an elementary school: https://pressprogress.ca/elementary-school-students-and-teac...
* Bomb threats against a children's hospital: https://ottawa.ctvnews.ca/cheo-targeted-by-bomb-threat-monda...
* Pelting ambulances with rocks: https://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/ambulances-pelted-...
These are just the things that were recorded, reported on, and archived with the links functioning three years later. Scroll up and you can read about what many of us saw in person. And yes, there's more where that came from. But it's much better to read from people who live in Ottawa and want to share their experiences: https://www.opc-cpo.ca/
Thanks for the list! I can say that three of the stories I was referring to above are the ones listed as "Attacking a shop employee for masking up on their way to work", "Smashing windows of a business with a Pride flag" and "Trying to handcuff shut the doors of an apartment building".
The first and second happened only a couple blocks away from us, and we frequented both businesses, so it was infuriating to see them and their employers attacked like that. We lived in an apartment building so the third one was pretty alarming.
Thanks for the evidence.
[dead]
Most of these are from the mainstream media. How about the truckers side of the story for each incident? For all you know it could be staged.
Not sure which town got the prominent coverage, but here in America a lot of the coverage we saw looked like a peaceful presence, organized to allow emergency passage, and frequently we saw what looked like a fair - lots of families strolling through, eating food, adults and kids dancing, buying random things from vendors. We saw interviews with drivers who told their stories and said they were there to peacefully protest, as was their right. It’s one of the reasons, I think, that the actions by Trudeau seemed so disproportionate.
On what? Fox News? Because that wasn’t at all how it was portrayed by Klepper who actually took the time to be onsite.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbmiKG56zuw
Here's [0] a muuuuch more balanced overview of the situation, the day after the ambassador bridge was opened.
[0] https://youtu.be/f7YIpSWqT0s?si=0DdPECPkBcU1AKKj
The convoy was largely funded by right wing American groups, so it’s not surprising they received favourable media coverage.
A lot of the family-friendly stuff was specifically for the cameras. A few things I can speak to:
* It definitely wasn't peaceful -- activists and Ottawa residents documented numerous incidents of violence, harassment, threats, vandalism, and so on in Ottawa. This document compiles some of it: https://docs.google.com/document/d/13-Zg8yjEPYyybbLy70njbWxG...
* Organizers encouraged participants to bring more children when it became clear police action was imminent, presumably to complicate law enforcement efforts. A Facebook post even suggested adding bouncy castles to "contribute to the fun" during these escalations. https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/02/17/freedom-conv...
* In the case of Ambassador Bridge, some reportedly put their children in front of the police. https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/convoy-protests-total-ar...
* There’s academic discussion suggesting that children and family-friendly elements were intentionally brought in for PR and to slow the police response. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/cag.12909?af=R
* Despite claims of peaceful protest, there were reports of ambulances being blocked or even pelted with rocks. https://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/ambulances-pelted-...
* This is without getting into the hate speech. https://www.ourcommons.ca/Content/Committee/441/CHPC/Brief/B...
I live in Ottawa. We were failed by all levels of government, our police services, and our intelligence services.
The convoy drove across the country, broadcasting their intentions on social media. Yet, everyone acted shocked when they did exactly what they said they were going to do.
I hesitate to call them protesters because I don't think they had a permit or a cohesive message beside F* Trudeau, but they were completely disrespectful to other citizens, and I could never defend their actions. However, irrespective of how unpopular their actions were, the courts have deemed the federal government's response unreasonable and unconstitutional, and I agree with that assessment.
The government could have dealt with this earlier and more directly, but whatever passes for "leadership" these days in Canada has proven itself completely inept.
Personally, I would like to see an inquiry into foreign interference in our elections, but I guess that’s not considered a pressing issue anymore.
> I hesitate to call them protesters because I don't think they had a permit
The notion that the common people need permission to protest is exactly why we are slowly, but surely arriving at oligarchies. The French are right. You don't need permission to show the ruling class who's king.
Perhaps bad phrasing, it is an emotional issue having lived through it.
I like to think that I don't live in a country ruled by a King but rather in a community of citizens who have collectively agreed on a way of doing things. This includes the right to express dissent against other citizens to whom we have delegated certain decision-making responsibilities. A permit isn't about seeking permission; it's about ensuring an orderly process so that things don't devolve into chaos and bouncy castles.
At the time, I think we were also in stage 2 lockdown(which should have been enough to stop it), so the people bearing the brunt of these actions, whatever you want to label it as, were not the ones making those decisions. Our elected officials don't live inside Parliament Hill.
> A permit isn't about seeking permission
Then they need to be renamed.
In Canada, we have the inherent right to assemble as granted by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms; therefore, I don’t need permission, which is discretionary.
Permits in this context represent authorization that establishes procedures for exercising this right on property administered by government, which ensure things like public safety without infringing on any rights or freedoms of the protestors or other citizens.
The inherent tension has always been "How much of an asshole does my freedom to protest allow me to be?"
Because protesting has always been about, to some degree, inconveniencing others to achieve your political aims.
>In Canada, we have the inherent right to assemble as granted by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms;
Playing devil's advocate here: what if it wasn't mentioned in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms? What if the CRF didn't exist to start with?
(my point being that when things are very bad, certain things need to be done regardless of what a formal law states, you cannot let tyranny call the shots)
A permit is literally about seeking permission to do something from an authority - the absence of which, makes the activity illegal.
> I like to think that I don't live in a country ruled by a King but rather in a community of citizens who have collectively agreed on a way of doing things
That is what a protest is. The collective agrees, not their rulers.
> A permit isn't about seeking permission; it's about ensuring an orderly process so that things don't devolve into chaos and bouncy castles.
I don't agree here, and even if that were so, there's a stark difference between the original intention and the ultimate use of permission as a tool.
I don't agree with your last point. In a democracy, we have elections at a cadence. If you disagree with protest permits, you are welcome to stand up in the next election, or vote for a representative who will.
We can elections yearly or monthly but man .. how unproductive that would be. The lowered cost of tech may indeed improve participatory democracy.
I see the system working in all of this btw. I support Trudeau but am okay if the liberals get voted out.
>I like to think that I don't live in a country ruled by a King
Canada is ruled by the British king/queen, even if only symbolically.
>A permit isn't about seeking permission
A permit is permission in granted form. Perhaps you meant something else, it's a poor choice of words.
The monarch of Canada is the King of Canada. It's a completely separate role from the King of the UK even though it's the same person. Canada isn't ruled by the British King.
You don't need a permit to protest in Ottawa, on foot, unamplified in a location where you do not block others. You do need a permit to block the streets with your protest. Those are readily and regularly granted -- if the city didn't grant them the courts will force them to. Once you get that permit, you'll get a police escort to block the street for you.
I took part in one political protest in my life. The leaders spent most of their efforts screaming at us “stay out of the road and don’t block the sidewalk!”
We were encouraged to bring our kids, and criticized by the opposition for doing so. Our kids had a great time and learned the value political participation.
The protest was 100% successful at it achieving its one, narrow aim.
Except they weren’t protesting or inconveniencing the government or the oligarchs, just their fellow citizens.
Which seems to have inconvenienced the government enough they had an outsized reaction, yes?
>I hesitate to call them protesters because I don't think they had a permit or a cohesive message beside
What exactly would you do if you were a trucker? i.e your livelihood has been denied for a long time?
[dead]
>I hesitate to call them protesters because I don't think they had a permit or a cohesive message beside F* Trudeau
I would assert that so-called "votes of no-confidence" in politicians are legitimate protest, even if they do not criticize any specific policy or behavior. It would be a strange world to live in where protests could or would be shut down and everyone would taunt the protesters with "but you didn't have a cohesive message except Stalin is bad".
There is a giant chasm between "F* Trudeau" and "Stalin is bad".
Some people would like you to believe it's close, and they would be wrong. Stalin murdered/tortured people en masse. Trudeau oversaw a government (democratically elected mine you) through a once in a century pandemic.
The convoy of protesters made a point, was allow to make it for sufficient period of time, and was told to go away when a majority of Canadians didn't agree with their stance.
When faced with reality of their unpopular nature and their inability to build a momentum or consensus. They dug in.
At some point, enough is enough. The Pandemic ended, public heath was restore, and none of what the protesters did mattered. None of the protesters continue to be persecuted by the Government of Canada, Ontario, or the City.
>There is a giant chasm between "F* Trudeau" and "Stalin is bad".
There might well be a giant chasm between Trudeau and Stalin, that's a matter of proper objective measurement which I don't think is easy and certainly has never been done. There is no chasm whatsoever between "fuck Trudeau" and "Stalin is bad". Not even much semantically. In choosing one politician/bureaucrat/whatever over another, I do not agree that anyone ever need justify their choices. Someone saying "I've stopped supporting this politician" whether don't politely or rudely, is valid. Protesting need not have any more message than this.
If protesting did require something more sophisticated than the assertion that one no longer supports them, then the weaseliest politicians and other charlatans could abuse that requirement (in fact, they already try to do so, and apologists make that easier for them to attempt it).
>and was told to go away when a majority of Canadians didn't agree with their stance.
It's unclear that a majority disagreed. It's unclear to me that there remains a majority at all in Canada.
>When faced with reality of their unpopular nature and their inability to build a momentum or consensus. They dug in.
Again, I'm not sure that's reality. If they could be deluded into thinking there were more of them than there were, what makes you immune to the reverse?
>and none of what the protesters did mattered.
We at least agree that it didn't matter in the ways that they hoped. But it mattered otherwise, when we saw the Canadian government use unjustifiable tactics to punish them even before they had been convicted of any crimes.
>None of the protesters continue to be persecuted
Well gee. When you put it like that, that "none *continue* to be persecuted" the complaints do sound kind of silly.
I don’t know why they couldn’t do the friggen obvious move of asking the police to unblock the roads by force, and impounding the vehicles for repeat offences. Going after bank accounts was a coward move that never made sense. If I just sat down in the middle of a subway tunnel, I would be removed by force immediately, no matter what I was protesting. They created problems for themselves by not doing the obvious solution.
Blocking a road is a fire hazard and should never have been tolerated by local police for that reason alone. You cannot impede transit in a city.
If only more people A) asked this question and B) looked into what was (not) happening.
Basically Ottawa police were insubordinate, sided with the truckers/occupiers/protesters, etc. The populist conservative provincial government completely failed to act, likely due to the protestors being on "their side".
> Ottawa was not being policed. Ticketing didn’t start for days. Tow-truck companies hesitated to move illegally parked trucks for fear of losing business from truckers after the protests ended. Protesters were refilling their trucks with jerry cans of diesel. When the police were ordered to put a stop to that, protesters began to carry empty jerry cans en masse to overwhelm law enforcement, but they needn’t have bothered: front-line officers were not following orders to stop them from gassing up. There were reports that sympathetic officers were sharing police intelligence with protesters. Anything the police did could backfire. Families with children were living in some of the trucks, and there were reports of firearms in others.
https://thewalrus.ca/freedom-convoy-the-prince/
> Basically Ottawa police were insubordinate, sided with the truckers/occupiers/protesters, etc
Maybe the correct move was to resign if it got that bad.
I agree, the police should've resigned if they failed to do their job. Call in the military.
That's basically what happened.
The police chief? He did.
The city or the province could have done that. They didn't. The Feds could only use federal reasons.
The mishandled response to the trucker protest should be blamed on the city and the province, not on Trudeau.
There is room for two failures. The province should have enforced the provincial law, and the feds should not have have taken action through the banking sector.
But this leads to the question if the province is not doing it's job, what do you do as the feds?
Not saying they did right, but curious.
My preference would be that the fed enforce the laws on the books themselves (if they have the power to do so), or pressure the province to do so (using the democratic leverage available).
They tried that for weeks and it didn’t work. So what did you want them to do.
Are there no federal police or laws that are applicable? Is there no federal funding that goes to the province that can be used as leverage?
Those would be my starting place.
There’s no federal police, the government can make their resources available but it’s up to the province to use them or not. And sure, you could use funding, but there’s no guarantee that that would have solved the problem. The province could have kept digging their heels in.
Arent there 30,000 Mounties capable of enforcing the law?
> what do you do as the feds?
I don't know exactly how Federalism works in Canada but the answer is their jobs. If that doesn't entail stepping in to provincial business, they shouldn't do anything.
There doesn't always have to be something done.
This is very easy to say as someone who wasn’t affected by the situation. Most people supported the federal governments decision.
Provinces are absolutely responsible, policing is all on them.
Ultimately, the responsibility rests with the truckers, period.
Trudeau was the one who triggered the protests in the first place.
The liberal, moral, fast and peaceful solution to the trucker protests was simple: stop forcing people to take experimental drugs against their will. The vaccines didn't reduce transmission, and there is no rule against living life in a risky way (even if you believe the vaccines worked at all), so there was never any moral argument for the mandates. The truckers were right to protest, as Trudeau and the Canadian people were doing them a severe injustice.
[flagged]
I'm an Ontario resident.
Every single vaccine or gathering mandate I experienced was either provincial (Conservatives) or municipal (also conservative for Toronto and georgetown where I live).that they barked up the completely wrong tree is the breathtakingly depressing stupidity behind the whole thing.
Don't believe me? Alberta Conservatives did not have same policies. Then they begged BC and Saskatchewan for ICU beds but that's besides the point - provinces and municipalities had freedom to enact different policies.
Also in Ontario. I am still very confused how none of this seems to have affected Doug Ford. This was the most mandated, school-closed, shut-things-down jurisdiction in North America at the time. And somehow Trudeau is apparently to blame for it all, and Ford is still... electable?
Meanwhile the feds only had jurisdiction over borders and airports. They acquired the vaccines, but it was the provinces that doled them out and set the policies for what would require them.
At the height of covid Ford even had outdoor ski hills shut down. Crazy times. Some of it made sense, some of it didn't. But I can tell you my neighbours with F Trudeau stickers were very angry about the vaccines, but still somehow are voting for Ford. Confusing.
Provincial governments were a mistake - the average Canadian fundamentally misunderstands the division of powers and responsibilities between federal and provincial governments, and this is remarkably useful for bad actors.
I personally think Chrétien was a terrible offender, since his balanced budgets in the 90’s were a result of pushing responsibilities on the provinces. The current wave of conservative provincial governments have similarly created their own problems (particularly with the international student explosion) while placing all of the blame of the federal government.
Agree on your second point for sure.
Harris/Klein + Chretien was a deadly combination, and more intimately connected than people will admit. Supposed ideological opponents, but the latter created the conditions for the former to thrive.
It was something like the Ottawa police said they were unable to and Ford said it was a local issue or not a priority. He was onboard with emergency act as it helped with Windsor too.
This was also voted on in Parliament too, 185 to 151
Thing is, the federal government does not have the power to "ask the police" to do anything. That's obviously by design and part of the demarcation of powers we expect from a democracy. The accusations of authoritarianism would have been just as drastic (I think?) if the PM had stood up and tried to call the RCMP or Ottawa police / OPP to task for their inaction and so on.
Sibling commenter is right: the police should be the ones under the microscope, for failing the citizenry. Questions should be asked about to what degree their membership was compromised by allegiance to or involvement with the convoy and its cause.
> Thing is, the federal government does not have the power to "ask the police" to do anything.
Wut?
The RCMP reports to Parliament up through the Public Safety minister. The bucks stops with the PM.
The federal government has not only the right but the obligation to hold the RCMP accountable.
RCMP in Ottawa would enforce federal laws not provincial. Seems to me you are talking about OPP responsibilities.
But that's not what I was arguing? Holding accountable is not the same as telling them what to do in terms of enforcement action.
This was actually discussed as a specific controversy at the time the convoy was undergoing. Trudeau getting on the phone with chief of police and asking him to clear the protest would be a serious breach of political standards in our democracy.
Also the police in question here are the Ottawa Police Service, not the RCMP, I believe.
Your phrasing is "do not have the power". Trudeau most certainly does have the power.
And I'd disagree about breeching political standards. The police are an executive function and report to the PM. I'd like to think Canadians know that.
The police are NOT an executive function and do not report to the PM.
The Ottawa police, report to the city of Ottawa. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottawa_Police_Service)
The Ontario police, report to the Province of Ontario (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontario_Provincial_Police)
The RCMP, reports of the Country of Canada (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Canadian_Mounted_Police). And the RCMP is "a police service for the whole of Canada to be used in the enforcement of the laws of the Dominion, but at the same time available for the enforcement of law generally in such provinces as may desire to employ its services."
The most important part is the RCMP enforcement in provinces is at the DESIRE of the provinces, in this case The Ontario Provincial Government.
Some Canadians may know the above.
Please read your own links!
RCMP
Minister responsible Dominic LeBlanc, Minister of Public Safety
How a Canadian doesn’t know the structure of their federal government is beyond me.
Where can I educate myself on the issue? The differing narratives have left me puzzled.
You're over an order of magnitude off. Over 200 people were debunked. A donation of just $20 could result in someone being debanked: https://nationalpost.com/news/politics/even-small-donation-t...
The show of power - that even a democratic government will target your families - is far worse than the relatively small number of people it hit.
Not around in the 00s when the US federal government leaned on banks and payment processors as a way of debanking pornography businesses?
Or - rather recently - when the German government stormed people's apartments for calling politicians idiots.
If I'm reading this thread correctly, it sounds like truckers staged a protest in Canada blockading roads. The government couldn't move the trucks because the cops sympathized with the protestors. So the government debanked the truckers as well as anyone caught donating more than $20 to them. Damn.
It takes half a day to get the details over with a judge and decide exactly whose and what accounts to lock, those truckers were allowed to stay there for months. (And if you don't know what exactly to block, you shouldn't be allowed to block anything. Maybe you still have enough reason to look at their movement, maybe not.)
Also, it takes a couple of hours to get the police to unblock a road. Last time I checked, money movement in bank accounts does not block roads.
So the threat of violence against a non violent protest resulted in the non violent protestors being labeled terrorist and justified all the action that followed?
95dB air-horn for 16 to 20 hours per day is not non-violent.
How close do you have to be for it to be 95dB?
A quick search shows 120dB at 1m isn't abnormal for a truck air horn. A line of them from far enough away will decrease in level by 3dB per doubling of distance. 8 doublings would make it ~96dB at 256m.
>Declaring the Emergency acts was overwhelmingly popular in Canada and remains one of the most popular things Trudeau ever did.
Where on earth does this stat come from?
It's definitely not 'overwhelmingly popular,' but polling shows majority support (66%) from Canadians for use of the Emergencies Act at the time of the protest.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergencies_Act#Opinion_pollin...
Upon digging, Wikipedia most prominently cites secondary sources here. The first of which is linked to a group called "Maru Group", whose website is dysfunctional. They are owned by Stagwell Marketing, whose CEO, Mark Penn, is directly linked to the US and Canadian Government, and more specifically to companies which were directly hurt by the trucking protest. Maru Group's sampling is tiny, they asked only 1500 people and they give no information on how they gathered this data.
Better polls have the numbers of people supporting this measure somewhere around 50%.
That scares me about the quality of wikipedia stats on other subjects.
For anything even remotely controversial, I stick exclusively with primary sources and ignore Wikipedia. The site is clearly compromised by admins who only want left-leaning secondary sources summarized. If you come across a controversial topic with biased, or even faulty information, the admins will remove edits which don’t comply with their bias, ban persistent users, and eventually “protect” the article. Even one of the co-founders has railed against the current state of the site.
It really should. I'm a PhD student (which does not overly qualify me anyway) but the more I look into works with quantitative measuring methods, the more I have a hard time trusting polls and statistics in general. Even in academic papers, or at least the ones I reviewed, more often than not the data is massaged in some way and leaves a lot to be desired.
It's best to immediately get suspicious if a polling company is owned by some parent firm with a clear conflict of interest.
That's really great work, thanks -- could you share a link to the 50% polls? This is probably worth porting back to the Wikipedia page to set the record straight.
They are also in the Wikipedia article, just further down. But what is really interesting is that the 66% source is dominantly cited in almost every single press article on the matter.
>Upon digging, Wikipedia most prominently cites secondary sources here.
That has historically been their explicit policy in general (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_is_a_terti...).
You're mistaking citing secondary sources for being a secondary source. In this context, Wikipedia would be a tertiary source. Yes, I get that this is their mission statement, but I find that when citing secondary sources as truth, you have to be even more careful.
A better way for this article would be "newsletter XY reported on a poll that said ABC", instead of pointing to the poll but linking to the newsletter.
>You're mistaking citing secondary sources for being a secondary source.
No, I'm not. I cited a document titled "Wikipedia is a tertiary source" in order to establish that prominently citing secondary sources (which is what makes Wikipedia a tertiary source) is established Wikipedia policy (as described in the document).
Yes, it's stated there that tertiary sources can in principle cite primary sources directly. But in practice, if you try this, you'll be accused of violating Wikipedia policy: in particular, primary sources for anything vaguely political will not be considered reliable (even though the dependence on secondary sources from the approved list is a major source of bias) and if you can't find an acceptable secondary source then other editors will conclude that the material is not notable.
> A better way for this article would be "newsletter XY reported on a poll that said ABC", instead of pointing to the poll but linking to the newsletter.
I agree; but as far as Wikipedians seem to be concerned, if newsletter XY is on the approved RS list, things that it says happened must have actually happened (and you'll only be allowed to challenge that with another source from the approved RS list; they'll say you're doing "original research" by pointing out directly that the poll doesn't actually say ABC, because that's, like, just your analysis of the poll).
Wikipedia is not concerned with truth, in that being able to disprove content in supposedly reliable sources doesn't entitle you to correct the material.
I don't know, but I live in the NCR, and few I know thought it was right.
The real issue was the Ottawa police. The RCMP and OPP were willing to help, and use legal means to clear the blockade. The Ottawa Police dropped the ball, didn't organize, and just made a mess.
I'm sure people directly affected agree with you, but it's been downhill for this regime since the trucker protest. We are literally still talking about it, right now.
I cannot comprehend how it could be overwhelmingly supported.
To be honest, I can't shake the suspicion that a fair share of the talking is not homegrown.
> Facebook stated that they had removed fake users that were set up in overseas content farms, in Romania, Vietnam, and Bangladesh, which were promoting the convoy protests in Canada. (https://ca.news.yahoo.com/u-congress-asks-facebook-role-2258...)
> An Economist/YouGov poll conducted from February 12 to 15 found that 80% of Americans had heard of the convoy protests. [...] Among Republicans, 71 per cent supported the convoy protests, compared to 18 per cent of Democrats. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada_convoy_protest#Opinion_...)
When you consider how much attention the convoy got in America, and how sympathies fell on such partisan grounds, it gets more concerning. Suddenly, Canadian politics is a hunting ground for the likes of Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, online bot mobs... I think you see where I’m going.
It’s difficult to approach these discussions and not feel like bad-faith actors are artificially making a bugbear out of it. This is especially true when many of the loudest defenders of the convoy weren’t even there, aren't even Canadian, and -- three years later -- may not even be people.
That said, I can agree the Emergencies Act probably shouldn't have been used here, and I have question marks about freezing people's bank accounts -- but this is really a conversation actual Canadians should be owning, since it concerns us most directly.
As a Canadian I haven't heard about the trucker protest since they happened. It was bizarre seeing it come up as the top discussion point in this thread and seems like a big mismatch between American and Canadian perception of what's going on.
ABSOLUTELY! This is clearly what right-wing Americans know of Trudeau and nothing more.
came here to say the same thing.
I don't think it was overwhelmingly popular - nor was it overwhelmingly unpopular. It was both in certain groups.
I agree a police response or similar was sensible for the situations you mentioned, but they didn't rise to the level of national emergency.
It's absolutely astounding that there have not been harsher consequences for the police who abandoned their duty in Ottawa. Where is the of rule of law here?
The Police Chief lost his job over it. What other consequences would you think appropriate?
Investigations and penalties for everyone up the chain, starting with the frontline officers who were on the ground refusing to issue tickets. If an officer chooses to not do their job over their political beliefs they do not belong on the force.
“If you owe the bank $100, that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem.”
Same applies here. If 10 officers misbehave, it is easy to fire them all, as you suggest.
If a majority of the entire police force defects, your only choice is between limiting the scope of the punishment to a few ringleaders vs. basically disbanding the police force and starting a new one from scratch, hoping that you can even recruit enough people to do so; but, in the meantime, the city won't be policed anymore, as the entire institutional memory has been purged.
In most similar cases in history, the authorities opted for a blanket pardon, as it is much less of a headache.
It is not even a new problem. Police is a relatively recent institution, but armies, gendarmes, legions etc. rebelled all the time, and peace usually had to be bought by concessions.
It's not unheard of to disband and reconstitute a police department. I would argue its the right move when the organization as a whole has effectively gone rogue.
The most significant example I'm aware of is Camden New Jersey.
The city’s crime rate was among the worst in the US. Within nine square miles and among nearly 75,000 residents, there were over 170 open-air drug markets reported in 2013, county officials told CNN. Violent crime abounded. Police corruption was at the core.
Lawsuits filed against the department uncovered that officers routinely planted evidence on suspects, fabricated reports and committed perjury. After the corruption was exposed, courts overturned the convictions of 88 people, the ACLU reported in 2013.
So in 2012, officials voted to completely disband the department – it was beyond reform.
And in 2013, the Camden County Police Department officially began its tenure. No other city of Camden’s size has done anything quite like it.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/09/us/disband-police-camden-new-...
Absolutely. I'm a paramedic. I will be in front of a licensing hearing defending why should be allowed to continue as a paramedic to the DOH if I refuse to treat a patient because of politics/beliefs, as an EMS provider.
Depending on the severity, I can even be facing administrative charges of patient abandonment under my state's Administrative Code for standards of care for providers.
"Over politics" does some legwork for you here as does the singling out of you vs the entire cadre of EMS.
Consider it, instead, that the police, as a whole, joined the protest which also had a decent amount of support from the populous.
That's a far cry from one person refusing to do their job with very little (almost none) support from the populous, as your analogy would be.
If it was a single cop refusing to arrest a Nazi for a crime because they agreed with them, that cop would be fired.
* populace
Loss of support for elected officials?
People don’t seem to understand that the government rules based on enough popular support.
When the police start siding with protestors that’s a government problem, not police problem.
The protest did not have popular support amongst the general population. If police support a fringe movement that's an everybody problem.
Look at it by age, it was highest by the youngest age group (61% had sympathy for the protest in the 18-35 age range) - the working age.
Crazy how only Canada has used emergency powers to curtail opposition. In fact it did that twice in 50 years. And only twenty people getting their rights completely stripped because they bothered the federal government workers in Ottawa is good enough according to you?
Maybe it's just because I'm part of a minority but your entire comment is exactly the issue with Canadian politics. We basically have 0 rights the moment a majority decides that we don't. I guess that's the perks of having an incredibly ineffective constitution.
Please don't cross into the flamewar style on HN. This comment is only dipping a toe in that direction, but still—it's the opposite direction to what we're trying for here.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: please see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42616298.
Are you talking about the militant separatists who had already committed mailbombings and escalated to assasinating a government official and kidnapping a foreign diplomat on Canadian soil in 1970?
It’s also important to note that afterwards Quebec separatism continued to be a legitimate political movement without a terrorist wing, with parties represented in federal and provincial governments.
[flagged]
There was a literal British army deployment to Northern Ireland for decades.
You think the US has not been doing exactly the same thing? What do you think the patriot act was? There are a million examples of this.
The Patriot act doesn't even come close to emergency powers. And the Patriot act would've been insanely worse if the US had the equivalent of our non withstanding clause.
So no, it hasn't been doing the same. Bush and his cronies sure would've wanted to go further though, I agree.
Also, another difference is that the Patriot act has been very controversial in the years since. Whereas the same hasn't been true in Canada for the usage of emergency power. And no one seems to care that we see more and more laws passed with the non-withstanding clause either.
[flagged]
> Crazy how only Canada has used emergency powers to curtail opposition.
As opposed to using it to curtail support? It was used against occupiers and there is no Charter right to that (2011 ONSC 6862; 2024 ONSC 3755).
> We basically have 0 rights rights the moment a majority decides that we don't. I guess that's the perks of having an incredibly ineffective constitution.
Wat?
* https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/csj-sjc/rfc-dlc/ccrf-ccdl/
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Charter_of_Rights_and...
There are multiple cases where governments (with majorities) have passed legislation that was successfully challenged under the Charter.
Further, the Emergencies Act was written post-Charter, with it in mind:
> AND WHEREAS the Governor in Council, in taking such special temporary measures, would be subject to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the Canadian Bill of Rights and must have regard to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, particularly with respect to those fundamental rights that are not to be limited or abridged even in a national emergency;
* https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/acts/e-4.5/page-1.html
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergencies_Act
[flagged]
> * But I hope you realize that it doesn't show anything. A federal or even provincial government can absolutely pass any law, with a simple majority, that doesn't respect the charter simply by invoking the non withstanding clause.*
And the use of the withstanding clause has to be re-up every five years, as that is the maximum time before a new election is held so that The People™ can decide if they want to continue with it:
> (3) A declaration made under subsection (1) shall cease to have effect five years after it comes into force or on such earlier date as may be specified in the declaration.
* https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/csj-sjc/rfc-dlc/ccrf-ccdl/chec...
> Can you show me a single piece of legislation that used that clause and that was still overturned?
The point of the clause was so that The People™, through their duly elected representatives, would have the final say in matters of government and not judges (who are potentially answerable to no one). Whether it should be judges that have the final say (like in the US) or legislators (like in the UK) is up for debate: in Canada it was decided to split the difference.
[flagged]
> But the point remains that the constitution is absolutely horrible for minorities.
Tell that to gay people who got to get married because of it—even though there is nothing about the topic in the Charter. This was before it was probably fully accepted socially, and I doubt any politician wanted to make the move.
See also perhaps abortion under the Morgentaler decision in the 1980s, when society was much more conservative.
You can probably say the same thing about euthanasia (which the SCC disallowed in 1993 (Rodriguez, [1993] 3 SCR 519) and then insisted upon more recently, which gave us the euphemistically named MAID).
Those are unrelated to the charter, and all of those have been allowed without using the non withstanding clause. As you said yourself, nothing in the charter says that gay people can't marry.
I genuinely can't think of a single time where the clause was used to add rights instead of removing them so I'm not sure what your argument is.
Almost everything you mentioned isn't really related to the constitution. In fact, any province could use the non withstanding clause tomorrow to make gay marriage illegal again, even if the SCC allowed it. So if anything,that shows how useless the charter is.
If your point is that the constitution allows for flexibility then sure yes, but that's more due to the "living constitution" framework that the SCC uses than the conditions itself.
> Those are unrelated to the charter
All three cases were decided on Charter grounds. Morgentaler tried challenging abortion pre-Charter and lost.
> Almost everything you mentioned isn't really related to the constitution. In fact, any province could use the non withstanding clause tomorrow to make gay marriage illegal again, even if the SCC allowed it. So if anything,that shows how useless the charter is.
The Charter is part of the Constitution:
* https://laws-lois.justice.gc.ca/eng/const/index.html
The Canadian Constitution and the rights there-in is not absolutist:
> 1 The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.
"In 1971, official date of the birth of topos theory, unfortunately the dream team at Dalhousie was dispersed. What happened, that made you go to Denmark ?
Some members of the team, including myself, became active against the Vietnam war and later against the War Measures Act proclaimed by Trudeau.
That Act,similar in many ways to the Patriot Act 35 years later in the US, suspended civil liberties under the pretext of a terrorist danger.
(The alleged danger at the time was a Quebec group later revealed to be infiltrated by the RCMP, the Canadian secret police.)
Twelve communist bookstores in Quebec (unrelated to the terrorists) were burned down by police;
several political activists from various groups across Canada were incarcerated in mental hospitals, etc. etc.
I publicly opposed the consolidation of this fascist law, both in the university senate and in public demonstrations.
The administration of the university declared me guilty of “disruption of academic activities”.
Rumors began to be circulated, for example, that my categorical arrow diagrams were actually plans for attacking the administration building.
My contract was not renewed"
https://www.mat.uc.pt/~picado/lawvere/interview.pdf
I love Bill Lawvere, but he punched the president of his university in the face, he was genuinely lucky to find a position in academia afterwards.
Amazingly there is someone living very close to the airport where they found the body of the Deputy Premier of Quebec (Pierre Laporte) in 1970 that flies the flags of allegiance to the successors of the terrorists (i.e. the MNLQ following from the FLQ) from a pole in his yard for everyone on the highway to see.
For some people all this stuff is very much part of their reason for being, but the FLQ took being obnoxious to make a point to staggering new levels. Just the titles of their books alone are astonishing, and impossible to quote here without causing justified offence.
yeah what people dont always understand (not saying you dont) is that FLQ supporters see themselves as basically being occupied by Anglo Canadians. Until the 60's there was entrenched discrimination in Montreal against catholics and french-speakers. The city even used to have two hockey teams, one for Anglos and one for Francos.
Ehh, I think a surprising amount of the Quebecois’ problems were self-inflicted by letting the Catholic Church run people’s lives, and the Quiet Revolution helped a lot. Like, it wasn’t the anglos bullying people’s grandmothers into having an eighth child after a rough pregnancy, the local priest would take a few minutes during mass to call her out in front of he whole community.
Yeah I kinda left that out. The Quiet revolution was about secularism and Franco rights in their own province.
[flagged]
Your account has been breaking the site guidelines badly in this thread. Would you please stop? Regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are, It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
We've had to ask you this before not long ago, so it would be good if you would review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and please fix this.
dang, it would help if you would clarify which guideline I'm violating.
I see a lot of deep flame bait in this thread. A lot of it by people of another country, making claims about my own for partisan and ideological purposes. Context here is important given news in recent weeks, with Trudeau's name on the lips of people like Trump, Musk, etc.
I have a "karma" of almost 20,000 and have been on hackernews for a very long time at this point. I'm sure my passion is showing through, but it feels odd given my citizenship and past here, to single me out.
There are some issues which trigger emotional response. I usually don't get into the back and forth response, but this is a seriously frustrating thread and I think if you're not ready for the level of passionate vitriol this topic (we have people driving around with bumper stickers reading "F* Trudeau" and this whole topic is tied in with COVID, vaccines, etc. etc.) will unleash, it's best to lock or flag this whole topic.
If I could venture, it's general tone (verging on polemical), and this specific swipe: "and you think we're somehow an anomaly".
You might also want to review your flagged comments on thread.
Among those, predicting downvotes and characterising the HN readership and/or opposition specifically goes against guidelines.
You can review previous interactions with dang here:
<https://news.ycombinator.com/replies?id=cmrdporcupine&by=dan...>
(There's an admonishment or two in there, take them seriously.)
I'm sorry I couldn't respond to this sooner! I got started on a reply and then ended up on a flight with no wifi.
> it would help if you would clarify which guideline I'm violating
I know, and I wish I had the cycles to clarify this in every case; it's just not possible. If you look at the first paragraph of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42629499, I wrote a longer explanation about this for a different user who was asking the same thing (albeit rather less politely).
As a quick answer though, comments like these broke the site guidelines by using inflammatory rhetoric, cross-examination, calling names, snark, and crossing into personal attack:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42615211
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42615260
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42615521
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42615584
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42615752
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42616108
> I have a "karma" of almost 20,000 and have been on hackernews for a very long time at this point
I know! and that's why I don't want to ban you, as I said here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42073831.
> I see a lot of deep flame bait in this thread.
Me too, so I spent hours moderating it and posted 20 or so requests to people to stop, as well as a general admonition at the top of the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42616355.
> A lot of it by people of another country, making claims about my own
Such perceptions aren't reliable. Internet readers tend to back-fit such perceptions to their assumptions about who would be holding a given position and why; but these assumptions are frequently contradicted by the data. Since the perceptions mostly add to one's feelings of aggravation, it's best to remember that one doesn't actually know these things (e.g. who is posting from where) and suspend them.
Unfortunately we can't publish the data without violating people's privacy, but many comments opposing your views were posted from Canadian IP addresses and many comments supporting your views were posting from IP addresses outside Canada. Not a perfect indicator, but it's clear that this argument breaks down on ideological lines, not national lines.
> it feels odd given my citizenship and past here, to single me out
You were in no way being singled out, and certainly not given your citizenship! If you look through my other posts in this thread (not that I recommend it), you'll see how many other admonishments I posted. We're as careful as we know how to be to moderate HN based on the site guidelines, not people's views, let alone their nationality, background, or anything like that.
There were tons of other users breaking the site guidelines in this thread, but it wasn't possible to get to them all. Unfortunately people tend to jump to the conclusion, when they see a bad post going unmoderated, that the mods must secretly agree with it. Nothing could be further from true; most likely we just didn't see it.
> There are some issues which trigger emotional response.
Indeed there are. The question then becomes how well we each can regulate our emotional responses. Commenters here are asked to do that regardless of how wrong others are or one feels they are. If you (<-- I don't mean you personally, of course, but all of us) can't do that without remaining respectful to others, it's best to wait until your activation has settled to the point when you can. That's not easy, of course, but it's doable. Your more recent comments in this thread, for example, have been fine.
> if you're not ready for the level of passionate vitriol this topic will unleash, it's best to lock or flag this whole topic
We do that much of the time but I don't believe it's either possible or desirable to do it all the time. For this community to fulfill its mandate, we need occasional cases of difficult and divisive topics getting frontpage discussion, and community members need to develop the maturity and self-regulation to be able to do it respectfully, remaining curious, even in the presence of others who are not doing that at all. Longstanding members have the most responsibility to do this.
It would be so much easier and less stressful not to take on that challenge, but then HN would be less than it might be, and it's our job to try to help it fulfill its potential.
[dead]
[flagged]
Would you please stop perpetuating this flamewar? I asked you upthread not to go in that direction, and instead you've gone full bore in that direction. Not cool.
(I don't care what side of the argument people are on—I care who is breaking the site guidelines and making HN a more hellish place.)
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Sorry about that, I didn't read your earlier comment. I'll tone it down.
[dead]
[flagged]
[flagged]
Maybe it's because other countries are too soft (talking from the perspective of a French who saw suburbs in fire because some people did not want to stop when the police told them so).
> No, the point is that that's two times more than any other western nation.
Citation needed.
[flagged]
I don't have a horse in this race, but I would have found it useful if you wrote what exactly you find terrifying. It's often in this kind of discussions that someone says "Things said here are X", but there are things said on both sides and I literally cannot tell even which side the speaker is on.
It’s also so very weird that both sides of this issue are likely nodding their head agreeing with you. I couldn’t get a good inference on which side of the comments you meant, personal opinion and assumptions notwithstanding.
[flagged]
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.” - CS Lewis.
[flagged]
[flagged]
>Freedom of movement is more important than safety.
Tell that to Typhoid Mary.
[flagged]
The BLM protestors in 2020 were cracked down on by the police, often violently, so I'm not sure what your point is.
[flagged]
Symbolic actions like painting "BLM" on a street are cute and all, but that doesn't mean they supported the protests. In fact, the cities such as New York and Chicago had some of the most violent suppression of protests by their police forces, despite loudly claiming to support BLM. Actions ultimately speak louder than words.
Read for yourself: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_police_violence_incide...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Floyd_protests#United_S...
> At least 200 cities in the U.S. had imposed curfews by early June 2020, while more than 30 states and Washington, D.C., activated over 96,000 National Guard and State Guard service members.[33][34][35][36] The deployment constituted the largest military operation other than war in U.S. history.[37]
That seems pretty outlandish. Are you able to provide a source for that?
Yes, I know since I was part of the protests back then. But there's an incredibly big difference between cracking down on a protest and invoking emergency powers.
In America, we didn’t need emergency powers to shoot BLM protesters. Or Civil Rights protesters, or the unarmed veterans of the Bonus Army, or union members — historically it’s fine to shoot protesters.
Conservatives are just snowflakes because it happened to their guys just one time.
BLM protestors were masking and social distancing. They were doing the right things wrt COVID.
Okay, so if I show you an example of a protest with people that weren't masking or social distancing, you'd be in favor of using emergency powers against protestors that were protesting for racial justice?
Did you miss? /s
[flagged]
[flagged]
[flagged]
Per Miriam Webster:
1: of, relating to, or favoring blind submission to authority
2: of, relating to, or favoring a concentration of power in a leader or an elite not constitutionally responsible to the people
It was quite pointedly, exactly neither of these. Words have meanings.
What glib nonsense. We had authoritarian right wing protesters -- who don't believe in democracy -- trying to topple our elected government. Imposing their will on the people in Ottawa for weeks, threatening violence and disturbing the peace.
i.e. Not constitutionally responsible to the people.
Words have meaning, as do actions, sir, and you're choose to ignore both because of your partisan blind spots.
[flagged]
[flagged]
> There was no "peaceful" presentation of grievance. There was weeks of civil disobedience and actual acts of violence.
Partisans love to play this game, where they judge a large group of people by the worst possible interpretation of the actions of a tiny subset of them.
For a protest which some estimates say peaked at ~18,000, this was the resulting set of "violent" charges:
"12 charges of assaulting a peace officer; six charges of assault; three charges of assault or intimidation with a weapon; five charges of possessing a weapon dangerous to public peace; two charges of carrying a concealed weapon; one charge of possessing a restricted firearm; and four charges of uttering threats of death or bodily harm." [0]
Obviously this is not acceptable, but the idea that the protesters as a group were "authoritarians" because 0.01% of them got violent is hysterical nonsense.
[0] https://archive.is/8VYvr#selection-4877.151-4877.502
Charges were low because the police refused to do their job. This is stated on record.
(Also... Partisan hardly describes me. I've never voted Liberal in my life and have been opposed to this PM since day one. Ask any of my annoyed coworkers and friends.)
[flagged]
[flagged]
[flagged]
[flagged]
[flagged]
[flagged]
America had human slaves built into its democracy until the majority said otherwise. Unsure why this is so shocking.
But that's the point of having constitutional limitations on political power and how it is exercised. Unfortunately, it's all to common to hear arguments that the exercise of political power should have no limitations so long as it's approved of by a quantitative majority.
A sufficient majority can change the constitution though. It’s impossible to have a mechanism that prevents that. So this is merely a debate of 51% vs. 67% (or whatever).
The amendment process is slow and complex by design. It's not just a one-off supermajority, but rather a supermajority in both houses of Congress (or a special amending convention) followed by a supermajority of states each individually ratifying a proposed amendment. The most recent constitutional amendment took over 200 years to be ratified.
The nature of the process makes it very difficult to misuse constitutional amendments a mechanism for implementing policy to deal with ephemeral controversies or emotion-laden causes. The only time that really happened was with the 18th amendment, and that was a disaster, which ultimately was repealed.
My comment was about democracies and their constitutions in general. I’m neither Canadian nor American. Yes, there are significant degrees in how easy or hard it is, but in the end if you have a sufficiently large majority that wants to deprive a minority of their rights, the mere fact of having a democracy by itself doesn’t prevent it.
IDK if this is a good argument.
The amendment process has indeed become impractical in the US, and given that "nature abhors vacuum", a different and easier route to bending the constitutional law was found - nominate your people to SCOTUS and let the interpret the Constitution favorably to you.
I would argue that this is a very suboptimal solution to the problem.
I don't know of any western democracy that has something this blatant in their constitution, though I might be wrong:
>A simple majority vote in any of Canada's 14 jurisdictions may suspend the core rights of the Charter. However, the rights to be overridden must be either a "fundamental right" guaranteed by Section 2 (such as freedom of expression, religion, and association), a "legal right" guaranteed by Sections 7–14 (such as rights to liberty and freedom from search and seizures and cruel and unusual punishment) or a Section 15 "equality right".[2] Other rights such as section 6 mobility rights, democratic rights, and language rights are inviolable.
I don't think the US or France can just do a simple (parliamentary!) majority vote to override almost every right their citizens have. And this is not theoretical, the non withstanding clause is getting used more and more frequently here in Canada. And remember, since it's just a simple majority in parliament, it's only a matter of getting around 35% of the total votes. So a government that has 35% the popular vote can just suspend any right we have. Is that actually common?
> A simple majority vote in any of Canada's 14 jurisdictions may suspend the core rights of the Charter
This is misleading. It also has to be in their juridsiction.
For example, alberta (25 years ago) tried to use the notwthstanding clause to ban gay marriage. It didn't work because it was out of their juridsiction.
> So a government that has 35% the popular vote can just suspend any right we have.
The notwithstanding clause only applies to some parts of the charter not all of it. It also doesn't apply to rights from other parts of the constitution.
It might also be possible for the federal government to disallow particularly egregious rights violation by provinces. I think its still an open question if fed still has power of reservation or disallowance or not.
> I don't think the US or France can just do a simple (parliamentary!) majority vote to override almost every right their citizens have.
What about the WWII Japanese internment camps? That wasn’t even a legislative action, it was Executive order 9066. There’s also the Habeas Corpus Suspension Act during the civil war.
I agree it’s not as blatantly spelled out in the Constitution but the mechanisms exist.
America is specifically designed not to be this and to prevent a tyranny of the majority because original immigrants to the USA were from minority religions where they lived in Europe and had been terrorized plenty.
And that designed failed spectacularly from the beginning. As the post you're replying to points out, slavery is essentially the majority deciding that a minority and their descendants have no rights whatsoever. This state of affairs lasted until the 1860s and even then those rights for the minority were severely curtailed until at least the 1960s.
I wouldn't say it failed spectacularly. The trade-off was well known amongst many even at the founding of america. There would simply be no America if slavery was disallowed from the beginning.
A hospital could still be a net positive for society, even if sometimes people go there and die who otherwise would have lived if they did not go to the hospital.
Was there a majority that was pro-slavery? My understanding was the agreement was that it was a minority that wanted slavery, and that slavery would be kept to that minorities states?
The Puritans were a minority group among the original settlers to the US, among the Dutch, French, Spanish, other British settlers and others. The founders and architects of the Constitution and US government were not Puritans.
The guy likely to take over is going to use non-emergency powers to curtail the rights of trans people.
The sanctioned individuals were involved with blocking an international border. They had the stated intention of causing mischief and preventing leaving or entering Canada. They were blockading their own economy; they deserved what they got. You don't disrupt life and economy just because you've been asked to help keep a virus from spreading and get to get away with it.
And now we'll curtail the rights of people who absolutely do NOT deserve it.
The lurch to the right is deeply inspired by attitudes like this. We even have the Premier of Alberta claiming that unvaccinated people are "the most discriminated against group in history", which, whatever "side" of the vaccination "debate" you fall on, you know is an unbelievably stupid thing to say.
Please, help prevent a drastic lurch to the right by at least reading the lede of an article as well as the headline.
[flagged]
As I'm just a lowly computer technician, no I do not get to choose who gets rights. That is typically the domain of judges, lawmakers, and more fundamentally the founders of nations.
Preventing goods from crossing an international border is called a blockade. In most jurisdictions, this is regarded as a crime and is generally done to harm an economy. Crimes are often punished. Some aren't (like wage theft, not since 1955), but a lot are.
Interfering with a country's ability to trade with another country, as well as publicly threatening to kill law enforcement officers, is quite a serious offence.
I am not certain left-leaning government should not punish crimes, as it's generally seen as a good idea to ensure that activity that disrupts life or liberty of others doesn't happen, and judiciary measures are a part of that. I guess we COULD try an idea in which people are trusted not to do harm, that could be an interesting experiment.
>I'm just a lowly computer technician
Comfortably working remotely, like I was, right?
That might explain why you can't sympathize with people who lost their jobs or businesses due to COVID restrictions and vaccine mandates.
I also think the protest was over the top, but it pales in comparison to what COVID did to people.
No, I worked retail during the pandemic and now work on-site.
I do not sympathise with people who refuse vaccination because I had to serve them when they were at their worst.
That's absolutely not what a blockade is. Again, by your logic, everyone that was part of the Oka Crisis should've been treated as a foreign enemy or a traitor, and prosecuted as such. I mean, they were armed and wanted indépendance. Yet that's not how it works when you are talking about Canadian citizens.
The exact same logic can also be used to prosecute the people who protested the pipelines in British Columbia. They were literally blocking the construction of a pipeline that was being built literally for international trade.
It's just an insanely dangerous logic, one that can be very conveniently used only against people who usually disagree with you politically.
Like your entire comment reads as a huge far right power fantasy.
Oh and by the way, judges can't do anything w.r.t emergency powers. That's what's so dangerous about them. They remove almost every check and balances.
I guess you're right. A blockade, by definition, is to "render [something] unsuitable for passage". They often have the impact of disallowing goods, people, aid etc from crossing a border (especially when a blockader says "I am blockading to prevent the passage of goods"), but I take your point.
In the UK recently, protesters who blocked major roads to make a point about fossil fuels were imprisoned due to the fact that they were disrupting infrastructure. One elderly protestor has even had to be put back in prison because a medical issue prevented her from being able to wear an ankle tag.
Blocking infrastructure IS generally something that gets punished. But again sometimes it isn't. Quite recently, a protest in London (UK) lead to major roads being blocked with tractors and other agricultural equipment. These protestors have not been charged.
Intent seems to matter. The Coutts and Ottawa guys were blocking infrastructure in protest at being asked to keep a virus under control; the oil protestors in the UK were blocking infrastructure to demonstrate that oil is maybe not great; the agricultural protestors were blockading infrastructure to demonstrate that paying inheritance tax is bad.
Maybe it's not about rights but more about demonstrations that correspond to popularly held positions? I'm not sure. It's something I think about a lot.
I mean don't get me wrong, I absolutely agree that they should have been arrested. I can't think of a single reason why they shouldn't have been. You can't blockade an international border without expecting to be arrested.
The issue wasn't that they were arrested or even charged of anything. The issue is that the government deliberately used the emergency act (which is basically a nuclear bomb) where they could've simply... arrested them. There was no emergency, there was no widespread unrest or any event that was leading to a loss of control. They could've absolutely just arrested everyone, using force if necessary, and moved on. The protestors weren't even armed, they could've just used anti riot police like they always due. As you said yourself, the UK protestors were arrested without using the equivalent of martial law.
So my point isn't that the protestors were innocent, it's that Trudeau's government clearly used the emergency powers act as a way to send a message, and to show that you won't just get arrested but also stripped of your rights completely. Which is to me absolutely abhorrent, and that's coming from someone who actually volunteered for Trudeau's campaign back in 2015 and the election after that one.
I would argue that the unrest was very much widespread. It was just distributed into different forms.
I worked at Chapters for that year, and after we started to require masks in store (we were all getting sick!), I had books thrown at me. That is unrest. What I experienced was NOTHING compared to what grocery store workers went through, nurses, police officers, transit workers... EVERYONE.
Those behaviours were dangerous to society itself; on an individual level, innocent people got hurt for nothing other than simply doing their jobs. On a wider level, had we thrown our hands up and went "okay, you're right. wearing a mask IS the worst oppression anyone has ever faced, Florence Nightingale is a mythical invention by Big Mask, and your individual freedoms are absolutely more important than anything else" and simply let the virus go on unchecked, we might not be posting on a silly orange website now.
I don't know if I completely agree with using the Emergency Powers Act, but it certainly sent a message that said "What we're all going through now is extremely serious. Sit down and let the adults speak."
And I think it worked. Merely arresting the protestors might have just been cutting a head off a hydra.
Maybe.
I don't know. We'll never truly know. It was a weird, lurid time for everyone and nobody knew what the right thing to do was with conviction and certainty. But we must have done something right, because we're still here.
But the incumbents of the day, in every nation, are being blamed. They are being blamed for...letting us continue to live?
It hasn't been a perfect decade. It wasn't under Harper and it won't be under PP, either. Westminster doesn't encourage perfection. Leaders are incentivised to just do enough.
It's going to be a difficult few years for all of us. Well, any of us bring home under $250k anyway.
The protesters at the border could and were arrested without invoking the Emergencies act. The border is under Federal jurisdiction and the laws broken were Federal.
The Emergencies act was invoked to evict the occupiers from Ottawa. They were breaking municipal and provincial laws and on land where the province and city had jurisdiction. The Ottawa city government, the Ottawa police chief and the province were all incompetent and failed to arrest and evict.
Surely there were options like appointing a new police chief which they could have gone to first rather than going straight to emergency powers and suspension of rights?
They did replace the police chief, but we'd have also needed to replace the mayor and premier, both of which take more time.
Still sounds saner than what they actually did.
So, because the provincial government didn't think that the situation justified a harder crackdown, the federal government used exceptional powers, usually used in states of wars, overstepped the locally elected governments and used an exceptional law?
A law that strips people of all of their rights, and suspends the charter? Is that supposed to make it better? Like you realize the provincial and municipal governments were also elected democratically? All of this for a local protest, with no deaths, little physical violence, etc.
I mean, it does give credence that the entire thing happened because poor federal workers were affected, but it's still not a good reason.
> So, because the provincial government didn't think that the situation justified a harder crackdown
Because the provincial government loves it when anything bad happens to Ottawa or when the Federal government gets blamed for something that's their own fault.
If it was Toronto that was occupied, the province would have stepped in early, quickly and decisively.
[flagged]
> concerns that the residents of Ottawa were ready to take matters into their own hands, and it would be a bloodbath
Similar concerns happened when Harper and Ottawa mayor at the time denied the rights and freedoms of protestors of the G20.
It's concerning how the "true north, strong, and free" is losing that last part.
Read more at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_G20_Toronto_summit_protes...
The federal response was largely due to the abject failure of the city & provincial governments to enforce their laws. The city and province had plenty of tools to get rid of the protesters: noise bylaws, parking bylaws, et cetera. They failed completely, so the Federal government was forced to intervene. The federal government did not have nuanced tools to deal with the truckers so used the blunt hammers they did have.
That's basically what happened. Between the three police forces, the jurisdiction was unclear. Parliamentary police and city police could not decide which laws to enforce as it depended on where the protestors were located. The province mostly polices highways and small townships that cannot afford their own police force. They quickly regained control of the highways to divert any additional incoming trucks but couldn't step in within city limits for trucks that were already there.
[flagged]
Can you explain what these illegal orders were, within the purview of Sloly's role as police chief? Also, who is the second Ottawa police chief you're talking about? For that matter, who is the third one? Furthermore, on what grounds are you claiming that Sloly resigned over illegal orders, when most sources agree it was over failure to perform?
> Furthermore, on what grounds are you claiming that Sloly resigned over illegal orders, when most sources agree it was over failure to perform?
I don't know enough about the situation to have an opinion about much of this, but at least on this one I don't think you need grounds to disbelieve stated reasons for resignation. I've personally witnessed many people resigning and giving reasons like "to focus on my family" or "to focus on my health" or something when in reality they were parachuting out before getting fired or were resigning for other reasons but didn't want to burn a bridge by telling the truth. I wouldn't be surprised if being untruthful (or only partially truthful) in resignations is more the norm than is being honest, and when talking about politics that probably goes up even more.
>but at least on this one I don't think you need grounds to disbelieve stated reasons for resignation.
I don't even see a contradiction in the first place. Of course someone who perceives received orders as illegal, and feels strongly enough about it to consider resigning, would "fail to perform" those orders.
I stand corrected that it Sloly was the 2nd police chief during the protest, not sure how or when I warped that in my mind to thinking that he was the 2nd resignation.
My point still stands though and as you say: he was pressured to resign because he wouldn't do what the politicians were demanding of him - which is in line with your "failure to perform" claim.
The actions then done under the Emergencies Act to "clear" the Freedom Convoy from downtown were found to have been illegally invoked.
And you know crime in Ottawa went down during the Freedom Convoy too, right?
Have you put your shoes in the Freedom Convoy participants at all I wonder to balance your perspective? Do you care about the RCMP horses trampling and breaking bones of an elder disabled indigenous woman, who just moments before was basically preaching about love and peace?
I can find that video for you if you'd like, if you haven't seen it.
Otherwise it's not worth it to put anymore of my time to debate this one on one, when I'm responding to someone who tries to support their argument with "when most sources agree" without citing any sources, and where I can predict which sources you'll cite.
[flagged]
Is this a runaround way to say you don't have any reliable sources to share with us? I'm sure if you linked them they would be very convincing.
> […] against the peaceful protestors.
At some point they stopped being protestors and became occupiers. There is no Charter right to occupy—as the pro-Palestinian folks also learned [1] (which was simply re-iterating previous precedent, see perhaps [2]).
[1] 2024 ONSC 3755
[2] 2011 ONSC 6862
At what point is that, legally?
Did they attack anybody? Obstruct anyone's access to a building they had a right to access?
Or does someone just need to declare that someone is an occupier?
It's quite clear what the limits are for protests in Ottawa. There are dozens to hundreds of protesters in Ottawa continuously. There are regularly protests of thousands of people. If you want to block the road, you get a parade permit which is easy to get. You can shout as long as you want, but if you use an amplifier the police will eventually take it away from you. You can carry obnoxious signs. Blocked roads because of protests are an annoying fact of life in Ottawa. But you shrug and move on, it's a cost of living/working in downtown Ottawa. I've never seen a protest block the road for more than 4 hours.
Yes, they harassed people, they cornered people, yes they restricted access to stores, buildings, and yes they used their truck horns to attack local residents by preventing them being able to sleep for days on end. Preventing people from sleeping via loud noise is literally considered a torture tactic.
[flagged]
You've repeatedly been posting in the flamewar style to this thread. That's not ok, as you know (or ought to, having been here for a good 14 years), so please stop.
Edit: we've had to warn you about this countless times, and you've continued to break the site guidelines badly, including in other threads than this. I'm not going to ban you right now, just as I haven't banned a different flamewar commenter (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42615795), but the same things apply to you as I said to them: this is not ok, and if you don't want to be banned here we need you to fix this once and for all.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It's fascinating how the same arguments can apply to the homeless, but how one sees the homeless vs. the truck protestors is likely to be polar opposites with one group free to stay as they aren't infringing on any rights, and the other group being a nuisance and having to go expeditiously. Which group is tolerated largely depends on your political alignment.
> At what point is that, legally?
Presumably when they started setting up residence by not moving their trucks, living in them, and 'importing' fuel supplies into the city:
* https://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/protesters-say-the...
Or it could have been when they set up saunas and barber shops:
* https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/feb/15/ottawa-truck-c...
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
(IANAL)
Preventing protestors from getting supplies like fuel to keep warm (etc) is an international crime.
They worked with local authorities to position trucks to allow adequate lanes and access to all of downtown.
Ottawa being the capital of Canada, it wasn't the first protest they've had - and so this was all standard practice/protocol for local authorities.
yes, they prevented people from sleeping — I never understand why people don't consider this attack, after a couple of days it's borderline torture
The Third Geneva Convention categorizes sleep deprivation as actual torture.
[flagged]
In what world is it ok to subject people to sleep deprivation techniques because “ear plugs exist”? That’s basically saying “I am allowed to enact violence on you, because painkillers exist”.
In addition to how absurd that is, I don’t think this would pass any kind of “pub test”.
A truck horn on the road outside being compared to legitimate torture is absurd.
you have clearly never experienced sleep deprivation, any human will go from normal to psychotic in about 3 days
[flagged]
YSK that the people who had their accounts frozen weren't simply protesting in Ottawa; they were blocking international borders to our largest trading partner, effectively holding our economy hostage. This absolutely constitutes behavior that's a danger to our nation so it makes sense to freeze the accounts of the people doing it. To be clear, there were many attempts to settle this without freezing people's bank accounts, but when nothing else works sometimes you have to get out the big guns.
That logic seems like it would outlaw labor strikes too, especially in important industries. Sometimes, holding the economy hostage is the point.
I take exception to the framing of “attempts to settle this.” The government used violence and threat of violence to make the problem go away. There wasn’t an attempt at compromise. Do what I say or else isn’t an attempt to settle.
Except it wasn't a labour strike.
That's how analogies are supposed to work. How do you expect civil society to function if people only supported civil disobedience when it's their preferred cause?
The recent postal strikes in Canada are an example of the situation you're describing. Eventually the federal government had to step in and break the strike to get the mail system moving again - if the workers refused to comply, against the orders of the government, I actually think strong measures like the freezing of bank accounts would be warranted and supported by most Canadians.
>I actually think strong measures like the freezing of bank accounts would be warranted and supported by most Canadians.
Typically such measures are mandated by court order, not executive fiat.
The government should be able to force people to work under worse conditions and less pay they want to? That’s ok if most Canadians support it? Really? I hope you can appreciate just how dangerous this sounds, even if you think my slippery slope has a lot of traction on it.
Out of curiosity, how do you feel about labor strikes? If customs, border control, longshoremen, or some other union decided to strike and picket would you support having the feds declare them terrorists and doing the banking thing?
If they blocked travel arteries like highways and bridges for more than a hour or two.
Stop Oil glue themselves to the road in cities as a protest, disrupting the economic output of major cities. They haven't been treated like a terrorist organisation.
By your logic they should be.
Actually the Harper gov't passed laws when in power that enabled them to treat such protests against fossil fuels as terrorist or threat-to-national-security events.
And pipeline blocking protests in BC saw fairly heavy handed police intervention under the Trudeau govt. Those blockades were cleared by the RCMP, quite aggressively, something which the police basically refused to do for the convoy protest: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Canadian_pipeline_and_rai...
I don't think it's really that cut and dry of a comparison in favour of your argument. Oil and gas protests in Canada have been treated more aggressively than the convoy was.
> effectively holding our economy hostage
This is what a protest is. (French here). If protesters go as far, and in Canada it was because you did them dirty, then you must sit at a table and negotiate. You must sit at a table and negotiate with everyone in a country. You cannot do someone dirty then complain that they protest.
It’s effects removing the right to protest, and therefore, removing democracy itself. Go live in Singapore?
> This is what a protest is.
They became occupiers when they started living in their trucks. There is no right to occupy in the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
If they had slow-rolled their trucks to create traffic jams that is a protest and would have been quite another thing (but also generally illegal, e.g., Ontario Highway Traffic Act §132).
If you don't like what the government is doing elect a new government: that's what elections are for. You don't get to throw a hissy fit and mess up other people's lives and livelihood every time there's a decision you don't like.
Every society is about balancing the rights of the individual and the rights of the collective, and their responsibilities as well. About balancing of different rights when they are in opposition to each other.
Not a Canadian, but no, a protest protests and gives voice to the disagreement. Blocking other people's rights is not just a protest and is likely to trigger action to protect others. That's how it goes everywhere that has rights. Normally, some effort is made to do it peacefully, but there are no countries where you can halt the economy whenever you want to force people to negotiate with you.
A protest which isn't allowed to do anything other than raise voices is a powerless and toothless protest.
I don't agree. There were a bunch of university protests over Gaza (slapped down for stupid reasons by university administrators under pressure from government), and, really, they just made noise, but they got a lot of people to notice, including myself. And to ask ourselves, what do I think about this?
If you are expecting protests to force someone's hand, that isn't protest or protected political speech, that's coercion. Some forms of that are legal (e.g., strikes), but there are pretty sharply defined limits.
Preferably online, but not on a website that everyone sees. Something silent. On the side. Also please have the dignity to die in peace, not commit suicide in a place where everyone can see it.
so you were okay with BLM blocking freeways, and city roads?
Did this ever happen for more than a day?
What are you going to say if the answer is yes?
I respect principled people a lot more than people who flip flop out of self interest even if I might agree with the latter some of the time.
If you are okay with the Truckers doing the same, then nothing.
I mean, this is the French way. SNCF striking (a yearly occurrence) is arguably halting the economy each time it happens.
As a sympathizer to the HK protests, I've heard all these talking points before -- that the protesters are ruining the economy and making things miserable for everyone. Usually the protests can really only get so big when there is a shared grievance that keeps getting ignored by the administration.
In the case of HK, the grievance was the possibility for criminals to be extradited to Chinese mainland.
In the case of convoy protests, the grievance was the vaccine mandate in order to work a trucking job that's mostly solitary with minimal human contact.
I think a better comparison would be the jan 6 protests in usa in 2021.
Please, disagreeing on a topic and providing arguments is one thing, but suggesting somebody go live in another country because you don’t agree with them on something that happened in their country is disrespectful.
Speaking as someone who has been in dozens of protests in my life: yes, that is what protest is, and as a protester engaging in civil disobedience you expect the response from authorities. That is exactly the point. When I have been on the receiving end of tear gas, there was no surprise. Big duh.
Crying because your illegal civil disobedience led to civil reaction by the law is the height of "oh no the leopard ate my face" idiocy.
They weren't punished by the law though, they were debanked in an era where you need to use the banks to eat, pay rent and to merely survive. That is above and beyond any legal punishment. It is economic banishment and it is se excessive that it alone should be shunned by any person who wants civilization to survive.
I mean, the South in the US waged a really big protest because they wanted slaves, and we murdered each other enough that they sort of changed their mind. Not every political grievance is on the right side of history.
> the right side of history.
A particularly odious moral framework, mostly used to justify mass murder.
Everyone thinks they're on the right side of history :)
I guess it's time for slavery again, then.
Or the ones in Coutts with guns and a pipe bomb.
Yeah are we forgetting Alberta truckers who were planning to murder RCMP officers, and were straight-up terrorists?
The thing they were found not guilty of? https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/anthony-olienick-chri...
> But Anthony Olienick and Chris Carbert were both convicted on other charges of mischief and possession of a weapon for a dangerous purpose. Olienick was also convicted of possessing a pipe bomb.
> "It was an overcharge to begin with," Beyak said.
> He said if police tried to storm the barricade, he would "slit their throats."
So a few of them had guns then?
They won't tell you this because the patchwork of regulations makes it literally impossible to do so legally but a very large minority, perhaps brushing up to scant majority depending on where you measure, of truckers in North America pack heat. They're in and out of all sorts of sketchy places all the time, never have local knowledge and would be insanely easy pickings for various types of career criminals if they (as a class of people) were not a risky target.
Can't speak for Canada, but this is definitely true in the US. I have no data other than my girlfriends dad (who I spent a lot of time with) was a trucker who refused to carry (and was a big fan of Michael Moore and Fahrenheit 9/11, mentioned so you know his bias) who got into a lot of debates with his coworkers about it. In the western US where the gun laws are more friendly, "damn near everyone" kept at least a pistol. At one point he actually started carrying as well after getting (wrongly, he claims :-D) roughed up by a pimp at a remote truck stop.
Fortunate for him, he benefit from all his coworkers having a pu lic reputation for packing heat even though he didn't approve of it himself. The criminals who might otherwise try to take advantage of him wouldn't know that he was unarmed, but would be wary of truckers in general.
Except he was victimized anyway, so the NRA talking point that criminals will rethink their ways based on an imagined firearm remains fantasy.
I think the implication was that he may have had some hand (or other body part) in the creation of that situation. It wasn't just some criminals saying "oh, a trucker, this will be easy money".
Not sure that distinction matters? In the “guns prevent violence” framing, the pander should have been afraid of the alleged john being armed, and not attempted physical violence.
You could be right, but it could also be that it was common knowledge that he was anti-gun because he never was shy of sharing his opinion, and it's very common for the same truckers to do the same routes repeatedly. I don't think there's enough evidence either way in this anecdote to make any reasonable conclusions.
If you think criminals don't consider the risk of being shot when picking their targets, I'm afraid it is you who is fantasizing. Robberies aren't "crimes of passion" where emotions overrule normal common sense.
Yet the guy was still assaulted, despite truckers being a prime demographic for packing heat.
I don’t think you have any sources to back that up.
I don't know about the details of this prosecution, but having served on juries, it is important to remember than "not guilty" is a finding that the government didn't meet the burden of proof, not necessarily a finding of actual innocence. That article would certainly suggest that they were prepared for violence, even if acquitted on the most serious charge.
It certainly is a finding of innocence when the presumption is innocent until proven guilty.
[flagged]
>but when nothing else works sometimes you have to get out the big guns.
Isn't that why you have the police, army, etc? You use force to remove those people breaking the laws, not go after their families. That's some USSR shit.
> Isn't that why you have the police, army, etc? You use force to remove those people breaking the laws, not go after their families. That's some USSR shit.
Nobody went after anyone's family.
If you solicit donations to fund a criminal act, you lose access to the money you raise. This is a thing that happens in normal crime too. Its not just an emergency act thing.
People forget that many of the protestors who lost banking access wasn't due to the emergency act, but because one pissed off ottawa resident sued them in civil court and obtained a court order to that affect.
[flagged]
> Police refused to do their jobs.
I think this is better framed as "joined the protest", from the perspective of the police. As a US analogy, sanctuary cities or states with "legalized" marijuana have police who are refusing to do their job. Should thenfederal government freeze the accounta of police officers until they do?
If the thing your doing is causing such unrest, perhaps the government shouldn't be doing that thing.
> The truckers were warned what would happen, and they made their families pay the price.
This is a terrifying comment and you should really start re-examining your outlook on life. I really hope you are nowhere near any sort of lever of power.
[flagged]
[flagged]
[flagged]
> I'm not on the pulse of Canadian politics, so I don't really know what sins or political circumstances have led Trudeau to this point, or if he has any redeeming qualities. Personally, I'm glad to see him gone.
This seems like a pretty big conclusion to reach based on one article and one topic, no? Especially when you, in the same sentence, also recognize that you don't follow Canadian politics?
Debanking someone in our current society is the most abusive things they could have done. It prevented people from accessing and using their own money in an era that is almost cashless. It effectively starved people out and left them trapped. It is so excessively overboard, yet there are those here who will defend it because it happened to those not on their side. When the government changes and it is used against them they will shout and holler with surprise. I'll never understand how people don't see how something that you allow the government to do to others will eventually be used against you too. It's only happened every goddamn time throughout history.
Offtopic to politics, but browsers these days support arbitrary text anchors.
docs: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/URI/Fragment/Te...
your link: https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/debanking-and-debunki...
> Offtopic to politics, but browsers these days support arbitrary text anchors.
Find this extremely annoying, especially in search results: I want to start at the beginning of the article/post, and not some random place in the middle—which is where the highlighted snippet in the search results are from, but not helpful for learning the larger context.
It also tends to mess up URLS that you may want to copy-paste as it has that text parameter garbage at the end (often with a sizeable amount of text that needs to be removed).
Agreed. I'm in the minority I'm sure, but I think this is an anti-feature. In addition to your good points, it's also very fragile as a small change in the text of the page can break the link. It also leads to monstrous URLs that are quite hard to read for people who don't know about this feature.
It's a great way to link to the source of a verbatim quote, though. It goes straight to the relevant context, and breaks only if the source of the quote itself is somehow changed, making the new inconsistency clear.
Wow. Came here expecting to read about truckers and instead learned something really useful! Thank you!
I've seen it used countless times before, but I thought it was something somehow being injected into the page by a search engine (especially when it comes from custom site searches on forums), rather than a browser feature.
Gentlemen you can't discuss web protocols tips on here, this is a tech forum!
Wow, TIL. Looks like a fairly recent feature, though (at least in certain browsers).
I don’t follow Canadian politics, and I don’t know that much about Trudeau, but having the capital full of honking, mad truckers, holding the government hostage for their demands to be met in a time of crisis sounds like an absolute nightmare.
There had already been one standoff between local residents and truckers, I remember there being chatter that the next weekend groups were going to coordinate in their neighborhoods and drive out the convoy on their own (using baseball bats, cast iron skillets, or golf clubs if need be). The situation had the potential to turn into an absolute blood bath.
In the US some psychopath straight up shot and killed a climate activist who was in the way of his car. It’s a miracle something similar didn’t happen there.
In the US? I recall an event in Panama. Quickly googling shows the person was a dual US citizen? Maybe that is what you are thinking of?
OP is probably conflating the environmentalist protestor shot in the US by cops and the numerous racial justice protestors killed by motorists, along with the incident you mentioned. Easy mistake to make.
I don't remember a protestor shot by cops in the US? Searching, I see something happened in Atlanta?
And I remember a few motorist incidents, but numerous? Certainly more than I would prefer.
You’re right.
If someone tried this protest in the US someone would have been shot night one.
[flagged]
Do we think it might be a little intellectually dishonest to equate a peaceful political protest with an armed hostage-taker?
I think this is important regardless of whether you believe in their specific target of protest or not. The right to peacefully protest is very very important, and your feelings on a specific protest should be wholly divorced from the importance of preserving the right to protest in general.
Nobody was held hostage. People unhappy with their rulers took peacefully to the streets and made noise and peacefully and temporarily interfered with some business activity.
This is the furthest thing from “holding the government hostage”. It’s the adversarial relationship between the populace and the state working exactly as intended and designed.
Armed hostage-taker? It’s unfortunate you feel the need to misrepresent my position rather than address the real issue.
This kind of distortion suggests an agenda. Regardless how sympathetic you might feel towards the protesters and the politicians standing behind them, we should focus on honest dialogue.
It is a fact that the protest was done in a way which disrupted the lives of the residents and jeopardized their safety. The right to peacefully protest comes with a responsibility, and the context in which it’s done matters greatly.
For example, a counter protest by medical workers was cancelled when a state of emergency was announced. Look no further for a model of responsibility in public discourse. We should make sure the voices of responsible citizens are amplified, not drowned out by furious hostility.
“holding [whatever] hostage” means an armed attacker and threat to life. It’s no misrepresentation, you were using exaggerated and hyperbolic terms to describe a peaceful protest.
Nobody’s safety was jeopardized. Some disruption is the point of a protest; you can’t operate the building during a sit-in, for example.
“protest in a way that doesn’t affect anything and allows society to ignore you” is not a legitimate or constructive type of feedback.
I live in Ottawa and lived here during the convoy. Happy to answer any questions as an actual resident from anyone about my experience.
What were the general public's opinion of the protests?
Also how 'dangerous' was the convoy perceived to be?
Were the actions of the Government deemed to be overreach?
As a Canadian I can say that most people I know have opinions about the protests and the government's response, but that whole affair is about 1,000th on the list of grievances we have with our current federal government.
It's a strangely American abstraction to focus on this as the animating issue around Trudeau's government and does not reflect Canadian reality on the ground.
The protests lasted quite a long time and I think the public's opinion on it changed over time.
At the beginning, most left-wing/centrist sorts of people saw it as an annoyance, but Ottawa is used to protests. Within the first week or so, people were bringing their kids to the event
After the first week or so (again, going by memory here), I think the general perception of danger started increasing dramatically. Most of the kids were gone, replaced my angry men with nothing better to do. In hindsight, nothing happened during the occupation, but given the overlap with the sorts of people who own guns (remember, the border blockade in Alberta at the same time did see people with guns), I think people were legitimately scared. The police certainly were too scared to do anything!
There was also a scare at the time at an apartment building in Centretown where someone tried to barricade the doors and light it on fire. This happened during the convoy, and while nothing happened and it seems it may have been unrelated mischief, we can only say that in hindsight. At the time it was very scary. There was another incident where truckers were showing up at a local school and yelling at people.
I think most people supported the Trudeau government in putting an end to it with the Emergencies Act, which later was found to be unconstitutional. It was pretty popular at the time. The general perception was that the federal government was doing what the provincial government (despite what Doug Ford thinks, Ottawa is actually in Ontario!) should have done weeks ago.
Thanks for replying. As a non-Canadian, your response has been more informative than the weeks I spent reading Twitter trying to figure out what was happening.
How bad were the covid restrictions in Canada that the truckers were complaining about in 2022? By 2022 most of the world had gone back to normal business-as-usual. Why were they even protesting? As an outsider looking in, it seemed like a mix of ignorance, propaganda, and stupidity made them do it.
Without looking up the specifics, by the time of the convoy, the vast majority of covid restrictions were gone. They liked to complain about vaccine passports, which Canada had, but by 2022 the vaccine passports were gone everywhere except the US border, by the request of the US government. So, from the outside, these guys were protesting and occupying Ottawa over actions of the US government. On the other hand, these guys don't really like being talked down to no matter what the elites say the real problem is. It started as a protest against vaccine passports but really turned into a ragefest against the establishment.
It's important to note that some of the key people who were behind these protests were not truckers, but were involved in earlier attempts at mass protest in Ottawa as part of the 'yellow vests' group from 2019
This isn't true. At the time the US required proof of vaccination at the border too: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/us-vaccine-mandate-frei...
This was implemented in October 2021 and wasn't removed AFAIK until May of 2023: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases...
How are Canadians occupying Canadian cities supposed to lift US restrictions? They can't, that's how. Again, it's stupidity, ignorance, and probably some propaganda/misinformation that spurred them on.
"How are Canadians occupying Canadian cities supposed to lift US restrictions?:"
They can protest (which they did) and Justin Trudeau could have picked up the phone and call Biden and ask to remove the restriction, which at that time of the pandemic was completely useless. Instead, Justin Trudeau played politics, he figured it was much better for him to divide the population on the issue than actually work with its biggest trade partner to remove the restriction.
Thing is that Canada already had the mandate delayed once by request to the US prior to it coming into effect, I believe it was 6 months delayed already.
The level of vitriol reserved for Trudeau on this topic is strange, considering it was US-driven policy.
Also strange considering the vast majority of "vaccine mandate" policy in Canada was provincial in jurisdiction, and the federal gov't only had control over ports and borders, so really didn't do much on the "mandate" file outside of that.
The reality is that this convoy was targeted for Ottawa and the Canadian govt because that govt was seen as weak and more easily undermined. The chief organizers are far right radicals whose previous involvements had been around protesting climate change initiatives and in favour of the oil and gas sector ("yellow vest" convoy in favour of pipelines and stuff)
The same kinds of protests done on the US side would have been met with far more severe consequences.
What is your opinion of Kraft Dinner?
Is KD unhealthy slop or delicious, and how do you feel about adding hot dogs or other toppings?
Now we're getting into the real meat of the questions. I love Kraft Dinner, in a somewhat ironic way. The best way to eat it is to add hot dog slices while cooking the pasta, then top it with ketchup. You can also have it with hot dogs and beans on the side (as my dad would call it, "beans and wieners and Kraft Dinner") It sounds disgusting, but its comfort food. Not sure if I would like it if I hadn't grown up eating it.
It might be an English Canadian thing. My partner is French Canadian and thinks its disgusting.
Interesting, had no idea they didn't do the KD in QC. Now this is a divide I did not think we had between the two solitudes.
It actually is disgusting, but you and I know it's that good kind of disgusting.
Now ... ketchup on KD... this i cannot let stand
I'll quote my own comment on the trucker situation from a year and a half ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37450666
> It's a story of everyone going way too far.
> The government(s) went way overboard with Pfizer proof of purchase QR codes to get lunch. Especially when uptake was 80%+
> They also went overboard by locking down again over the holidays when everyone was already catching the most contagious Omicron. People not being able to go to a gym to stay fit, that already needed a barcode, swayed a lot of the public that things were going on too long.
> But the obnoxiousness of the truckers also went too far for too long. The news of rifles and arrests in Alberta was (obviously) too far.
> I don't have a citation on hand, but at one point more than a third of Canadians did support either the truckers explicitly or their aims, and that's a higher percentage than voted for the current governing party. Support was higher among younger people, sometimes over 50%. But this percentage decreased as time went on.
> The government also completely failed to act diplomatically or to de-escalate the situation. Instead we had inflammatory rhetoric and a focus on some silly flags (which should be condemned, but a lot of people have doubts as to their sincerity, and I've seen some pretty gross signs against the unvaxxed too)
> Some people, even in this comment section, take their rhetoric and opposition too far.
> There is no doubt in my mind that the more time passes, the more we will look at Canada's response to the pandemic (especially in its later years) as a horrendous failure that harmed trust in public health, harmed social cohesion, and harmed our democratic and civil institutions. Everyone failed and everyone suffered as a result.
You mentioned specifically restrictions on lunch. Do you just mean that there are more office workers eating lunch because it is during the day? Or were the vaccine passport rules different depending on what meal or time of day?
It was just an example - in most places the vaccine passports were required for any sit down service where you have a server (not fast food or to go orders)
Quebec did impose curfews, and overall had the strictest restrictions by a long way. Around the time of the protests there were plans to tax or fine the unvaccinated and big box retailers were already restricting access to all parts of the store save for the pharmacy.
I guess what I'm not getting here is this: the rage about the "everyone that went too far" doesn't seem to have extended to the people who actually did that. By which I mean our provincial governments, with their ad hoc dubious and last minute irrational responses. Specifically, Doug Ford who seems to have suffered not a bit in terms of support but enacted the most draconian of COVID restrictions and lockdowns, all at the last minute and after numbers were skyrocketing, not before...
Meanwhile Trudeau did what... airports and borders. The feds influence here was not high. ArriveCAN was a debacle, obviously. But the trucker thing was US initiated.
I don't think there's anything the feds could have done to head this off. They couldn't make the trucker vax thing not happen, not with Biden insisting on it. They had no control over what was happening in workplaces and schools across the country. Their biggest fault, I think, was being weak -- which the opposition took advantage of to create mayhem and try to bring the govt down.
That the people organizing the protest were in part former oil industry lobbyists and had previously been involved in climate change denying anti-carbon tax protests should also make one pause about what the motivations might be and where the money might be coming from, as well?
Regardless, I think we agree: by January with Omicron showing that it would transmit like crazy regardless of vaccine, mandates everywhere should have been dropped.
The protests in Ottawa and the two border crossings ballooned from just being about the trucker mandates (which really didn't impact that many people, since trucking industry reps reported rates of vaccination in line with the general population) to being an all-out protest against restrictions in general. I did see several protests in BC, including at the legislature.
What the federal government could have at least tried, in my opinion, was to be humble and release the tension. Trudeau's sanctimoniousness manifested itself too strongly and only escalated the situation, which he had seen coming earlier in the year by calling mandates "divisive" - presumably before polling numbers showed that Canadians are mostly a compliant bunch who didn't have much time for tinfoil hat types (research by UBC and VCH later showed that those already disadvantaged, such as the homeless, were vaccinated at a lower rate than the general population and disproportionately impacted by mandates. I'd love to link citations here but finding 2-3+ year old studies and articles is painful) Instead, several of Trudeau's statements at this time, including "do we tolerate these people" became rallying cries for the populists.
Ok: what could the feds do to release tension, concretely? They had no ability to undo any mandates, since 90% of them came from the provinces, not the feds. Likewise, the trucker thing was coming from the US.
I guess they could have maybe done some changes in tone -- but they may also have been seen by the population as giving into what were frankly seen by most as fringe radicals.
And finally, the actual leaders of the convoy would not have been interested. This wasn't their first rodeo. They wanted to bring the govt down, and not because of COVID but because of everything -- they had previously been in Ottawa trying to pull a similar thing around "pipelines" and carbon tax.
People on hn seem weirdly obsessed with trudeau's handling of the trucker protest. Regardless of what you think of it, at this point it is very old news and trudeau's actions were controversial but largely popular.
The handling of the trucker protest is not why he resigned. It is not why he is unpopular.
I live and work with mostly conservatives and none of them supported the truckers nor do they even mention it. Their grievances are more typical - inflation, taxes, and immigration.
I think we need to be careful when reading these opinions to not mix up Americans’ views, Russian trolls with legitimate Canadian discourse.
I’ve noticed a ton of non-Canadians like to reference this event as if it’s some incredible example of government tyranny gone too far. Nearly anyone who lived in Ottawa during this time (like me) would say the police completely failed the city, and the “protests” went on for literal weeks too long due to inaction and incompetence by all levels of government.
Hacker News is pretty much far right when it comes to politics. Heck the moderators refused to allow any criticism of the monarchy when the queen died but allowed it when Jimmy Carter died.
> Hacker News is pretty much far right when it comes to politics.
Not necessarily always far-right, but almost obsessively anti-establishment.
Criticizing someone during their funeral is in pretty poor taste regardless of your political leanings.
They refused any criticism of the institution itself in addition to the person. But for carter criticism of him and his politics were fair game.
See, you were not supposed to say the quiet part out loud
This is not top of mind for Canadians at this time. Anyone who still thinks about the trucker protests is already not voting liberal or NDP.
> Whatever you think of the truckers' position or protest tactics, any punishment for their actions ought to go through the laws and court system.
Your personal opinion seems to be completely uninformed or misinformed, by the way you tried to frame it as something done to truckers instead of what it actually was: lifting a blockade.
It's even more baffling when taken into account the alleged motivation: COVID-19 restrictions.
> I'm not on the pulse of Canadian politics, (...)
It shows.
>'The intent was not to get at the families', and when a democratic government starts a sentence that way something deeply #&$#ed up has happened."
Wait, are people that shocked that their democratic governments are wiling to act like mobsters/dictators against a minority group just to get their way and appease a majority, when the history books are full of such examples? People must have a short memory then and why history repeating itself is a fact.
[flagged]
[flagged]
[flagged]
[flagged]
Would you please stop posting in the flamewar style to HN? Your account unfortunately has been doing this repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
To be clear, is "Anyone who doesn't like this should think about which members of their immediate family they want included in that 70,000 deaths." not also the same sort of flamewar style?
Indeed it is, and I posted a similar moderation request to that user (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42614856) 37 seconds after posting the GP. I'm afraid I operate serially!
Oh, I don't know why it didn't show up for me.
Probably because its parent was flagged and therefore auto-collapsed.
It's just double standard and selective enforcement.
I posted https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42614856 10 hours before you posted this.
You know what would actually help dang? Actually telling what exactly was flamewar about that comment instead of flexing the mod status and being biased and double standard with your selective enforcement bs just because some butthurt pussies here abuse the flag button? Talk to them instead to stop that abuse.
What exactly was flamewar about posting that countries of people aren't guinea pig cages? Go on, enlighten me please. What rule did that comment break? Did you even read my comment or are you swinging your hammer based on people abusing the flag button?
I know that a detailed personalized response is more helpful, but it's impossible to do that in every case because it's so time consuming. I could spend all waking hours doing nothing but that and still only cover a fraction of the customized explanations that people want—even before counting the fact that many explanations generate further questions that need further explanation. So we have to get by with shorthand most of the time.
In your case, I wasn't just responding to one comment but to your pattern of commenting; note the word "repeatedly" in my post. That's a reference to other comments like these, from the current thread:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42612466
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42612129
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42612019
... as well as sundry others from other theads such as these recent examples:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42604263
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42565173
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42560453
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42543675
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42493547
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42472874
Your pattern of commenting includes inflammatory rhetoric, being aggressive to other users, cross-examination, name-calling, political and ideological battle, sneering at the rest of the community, and other things that clearly break the HN guidelines–and that's just with your current account.
It's true that your comment that I replied to (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42612748) was one of the lesser cases of this, but it still included inflammatory rhetoric ("and if my mom had balls she's be my dad" adds no information—it's just a putdown, and ditto for "America, Australia, Canada, Europe etc, aren't interchangeable lab cages of guinea pigs", since no one is arguing that they are). But the rest of that comment was fine. The reason I replied there is not because I thought it was the worst case, but because it was a leaf node in the thread.
In any case, the issue (as I said) is the pattern. You're breaking the site guidelines so often that your account is on the line of being one that we would ban, if not already over the line.
[flagged]
Would you please stop posting flamewar comments to HN? We've had to ask you this so many times I don't even want to bother digging up all the links. As I'm sure I've said more than once before, we'll have to ban you if you keep this up, so please just stop.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
As somebody who lived in Ottawa at the time, this was not good coverage. Neither was DHH's. It was incredibly rage-inducing to read in real time as it was happening too. My takeaway from this is that one should minimize the confidence in one's opinion of foreign events.
"I'm not on the pulse of Canadian politics, so I don't really know what sins or political circumstances have led Trudeau to this point, or if he has any redeeming qualities. Personally, I'm glad to see him gone."
- Wow, for no reason you're glad to see him gone?
> I'm not on the pulse of Canadian politics
> I don't really know what sins or political circumstances have led Trudeau to this point
> Personally, I'm glad to see him gone
Why do people do this? You don't keep up with Canadian politics and you don't know what led Trudeau to this point, yet you're glad he's gone? Is it not OK anymore to just not have opinions either way, and people have to take a stance on everything?
It's not as if Canadians are any more reserved about their nth-hand opinions about Trump. Speaking as a Canadian here.
I mean, are we really nth-handed? The sad thing about, as they say "Sleeping with the Elephant" is you get first hand experience of the elephant's ... movements ... even if they never notice yours.
Trade war against Canada can have pretty dire consequences, and so putting aside all the other things people say about Trump... the fact of the matter is he slapped massive tariffs on us last time around and is talking about doing worse this time around... so we have pretty 1st hand legit concerns
I have to say, as a Canadian, I kind of miss it when nobody outside of here cared what happened up here?
Now it's all "You should be a 51st state" and "Oh your Trudeau is a COMMUNIST and needs to GO!"
so that's the thing right
people who are geniuses at one thing may be completely out of their depth in other areas
I think this is sadly a demonstration of one of those
While I agree with patio11's assessment here, if you were to poll the average Ottawan about the trucker protest, you'll largely get back a response of "#&$! those people", soley because they were minorly-inconvenienced by them.
Canadian politics (not uniquely here) is plagued with petty squabbles. The really meaningful political and social issues don't get any airtime.
> minorly-inconvenienced
120dB train horns at 2AM in the morning in a residential area is not a minor inconvenience.
> a residential area
Have you ever actually been to downtown Ottawa, where those protests were held?
It's not "a residential area" in any sense.
The moderately-wide Ottawa River forms the north-west edge of the downtown area.
Along it are the Alexandra Bridge, Major's Hill Park, the Rideau Canal, Parliament Hill, the Supreme Court, Library and Archives Canada, and other government-related buildings and infrastructure. Those aren't residential.
Immediately south-east of those is Wellington Street, where those protests were held, literally right in front of Parliament Hill. It's about as close as they could physically get to the Parliament Buildings.
South-west of that, there are numerous government office buildings, commercial office buildings, small shops, restaurants, a few hotels, and so on for a number of blocks. Again, those aren't residential.
Also keep in mind that the government-imposed lockdowns and other restrictions being protested were preventing or severely limiting the use of the offices, hotels, restaurants, and other businesses in the area.
You have to go out about 1 km from Parliament Hill before you even begin to start encountering any significant number of apartment buildings and residences.
Downtown Ottawa is not "a residential area", and those protesters were in the most relevant, appropriate, and reasonable place they could have been to protest policies imposed by the Government of Canada.
I know several people who live in those "non-residential" areas you describe.
For example, https://www.google.com/maps/place/9+Rideau+St,+Ottawa,+ON+K1... is a condo building.
Singular counter-examples are meaningless in reference to the category "residential".
> It's not "a residential area" in any sense.
When you say it is not a residential area in “any sense” and he finds a counterexample showing it is clearly a residential area in some sense then what you said is just untrue.
I'll play: we can find 1m² of road in the residential area that is obviously not residential. Now we have two counterexamples that conflict. Logically the premise is meaningless.
why make a new definition of residential? ottawa already has agreed upon zoning; you can find it here: https://ottawa.ca/en/living-ottawa/laws-licences-and-permits...
i dont see why a bit of road would justify honking the horn all night at an apartment building though. can you elborate on what changes when there's a road? the apartment building has people sleeping in it.
"several people" is not singular
> Have you ever actually been to downtown Ottawa, where those protests were held?
> It's not "a residential area" in any sense.
World-renowned pianist Angela Hewitt would disagree:
* https://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/angela-hewitt-play...
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angela_Hewitt
Her living room, with her piano, is in the area.
Both of these links state pretty clearly that she lives in London. In the UK.
It isn't uncommon for posh famous people to have their posh second, third, etc., residences in places that where normal regular people don't actually live...like Downtown Ottawa.
Were you in the location at that time? Because you are speculating based on a perfunctory knowledge of the map. I live in this "non-residential" area along with tens of thousands of others. The truckers were not just occupying Wellington, they were on all streets till Somerset between Elgin and Bronson. And hundreds of vehicles blaring horns together reaches very far.
That stopped after the judge gave an injunction. That judge also said the protest could otherwise continue as was a Charter right.
[flagged]
[flagged]
No they're not, at least not in Ottawa at 2AM. They might do a quick blip at an intersection but generally they run silent. There was a massive difference between the train horns and the sirens. The horns were continuous, sirens are very occasional and short.
You're completely missing the point.
If you live around a million other people, you're going to have to deal with loud noise in the middle of the night at some point. Scale this up or down depending on how many people you're living near.
For the entire time that I lived in Manhattan, loud noise at 2am was unavoidable. You get thick windows, leave them closed, buy curtains and run your AC.
I'm so sorry that you were inconvenienced.
The loud noise is a rare and short event, not a nightly recurring occurrence of a long loud continuous blare. If it was as you say, then the protestors wouldn’t be doing it to gain attention.
Yes, a group of people decided that the only way to get their message across was to be assholes for a while.
I would label this as an inconvenience. A bunch of Canadians, including commenters in this thread, believe it to be terrorism.
Terrorism to justify removing these peoples rights and not addressing their concerns.
I'm so glad for you Canadians that this Trucker Protest was the closest thing that your nation can approximate to Terrorism. I don't consider this a serious perspective though.
I don’t think it’s terrorism but that’s not why the back accounts were frozen.
The people involved with noise pollution should definitely have been handed significant fines and escalating punishments similar to anyone violating noise ordinances. It gets trickier since these actions are in support of a larger organized effort but that should be the minimum punishment.
The terrorism aspect comes from shutting down trade on a hugely important trade route with our largest trading partner, holding the economy hostage to make demands of the government. That by itself isn’t terrorism per se but the legitimate threats to use violence to keep the embargo going fits the textbook definition of terrorism, using violence or threats of violence to achieve political goals.
Who has called the truck horns terrorism? I see people calling sleep deprivation torture, and I see people calling an armed border occupation terrorism.
Several other posts all over this thread.
At a minimum they were actually taking proactive action to be nuisances in solidarity with terrorists. Whether that makes you a terrorist I don’t know, but historically governments frown on those providing any kind of support to terrorists and tend to use the transitive property when dealing with such actions.
> I would label this as an inconvenience.
Yeah, that kind of comment pops up after "non-violent" protest that privates innocent people of fundamental rights.
Get someone to put you in sleep-deprivation torture for a few days, and tell us back how minor of an inconvenience it is.
Are you trying to compare an emergency vehicle -- which is there to save someone's life -- with someone blasting a train horn outside your house to harass your neighbourhood as a deliberate political tactic? Are you looking to imply that all noises, for all reasons, at all hours, are equal, and therefore what they did is beyond reproach?
As a follow-up question -- were you impacted by this event? Were you there, even momentarily?
> if you were to poll the average Ottawan about the trucker protest, you'll largely get back a response of "#&$! those people", soley because they were minorly-inconvenienced by them
This just illustrates why pure/Athenian democracy doesn’t work. Madness of the crowds and all that. Decide most issues by plebescite and you get an emotional outcome.
I can't imagine looking at Republican Rome or any of the tyrants in the ancient world and thinking they're better.
The Republic fell because a bunch of senators were too greedy and refused to do basic land reform or anything else to make life better for anyone other than themselves.
There's no shortage of absolutely insane tyrants that made people's lives miserable.
its a much less severe response than there would gave been, compared to say, ottawabs torching the trucks along with anyone in them
Switzerland has direct democracy and seems to go fine with it.
> soley because they were minorly-inconvenienced by them
The trucker protests were right in the middle of the Covid supply chain issues. Not defending the actions taken in particular, but it had the potential to be a much worse issue than a minor inconvenience.
Is this where the meme about Canadians being very polite comes from - a tendency towards pettiness rather than really nasty political rifts? (I don't know anything about Canadian culture)
Spend 5 minutes in Toronto Union Station during commuter hours and you'll never describe Canadians as polite again.
That's the very worst point of view you'll ever get of Canadians. Of course people in a busy train station during rush hour aren't in the best mood.
Travel the country up and down, big cities and small towns, and I guarantee you will conclude that Canadians are the best people around.
They are also not all Canadian in the station
French Canadians are not a welcoming people.
As a French Canadian this is unfortunately true the further north you go.
Fwiw, I’m not trying to knock you, it was just my experience.
I had some of my best times in Quebec (City). I felt super welcome despite only speaking English.
I do understand where you're getting at though, and trust me, if you go to Berlin and you only speak English, you'll get far worse than you would from the Québécois for doing the same.
It's almost like those Americans who give people shit for not speaking English, except we have even less entitlement to that.
Yes and no.
1/3 of the country's entire population is in the GTA. That brief moment is the most contact that Canadians will have with each other on any given day.
And they treat everyone worse than garbage. I've been in busier commuter zones that have been far more civil than that.
Even the drunks going home on the LIRR are better than that.
I won't disagree with you that Canadians are great people -- I spent a lot of time living there for a reason -- but you have to judge people by when their hair is down, not their Sunday best.
Daily traffic at Union is 300k according to a quick google.
So the most annoyed 1% of Canadians go through there every day.
Not the world’s most rigorous basis for a sweeping statement about an entire culture.
And yet if you go there at commuter times and spend 5 minutes just observing, I'm sure you'll feel the same way.
The funniest thing about the responses here to me is that not a single person has disputed the characterization I presented -- what I'm describing seems to be clear enough to everyone.
I spent years commuting via that very station, and others like it in cities elsewhere in the world.
It’s just a whole bunch of stressed people in a hurry.
There are still Canadians in Canada?
ethnic canadians are still about 5% of the population, if you can believe it.
This seems a bit confused.
Canada is not the US. Why would it matter when the judiciary is not a co-equal branch of government?
i.e. When there is Parliamentary sovereignty/supremacy?
An inferior authority can never legally overrule a superior authority by definition.
> Why would it matter when the judiciary is not a co-equal branch of government?
Then there is an external guarantor of the rights of the people against the government.
You mean the same external guarantor of the rights who gets picked by the same government?
Huh? What ‘external guarantor’?
> What ‘external guarantor’?
…the coëqual judiciary.
How can a subordinate entity be external?
A subordinate judiciary isn’t coëqual.
I know it’s not coequal, because I was the one who wrote this…
[flagged]
There were four people with Nazi flags in the beginning who disappeared almost instantly. A classic way of discrediting a protest. (A real Nazi however received a warm reception in the Canadian parliament: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-66943005)
No one had a pro-Putin sign? Why would they? At that time Putin was sitting at 20m long tables, which should have pleased Fauci himself. Putin was "following the science"!
I'm really opposed to this classic way of mixing an imaginary "far right" with Putin as if they do not have their own grievances.
You are right about the honking, which should have been dealt with more quickly but stopped after an injunction after a couple of days.
[flagged]
[flagged]
[flagged]
[flagged]
[flagged]
Well, I'm disappointed in Patio11 now. I sort of looked-up at him.
> I'm not on the pulse of Canadian politics, so I don't really know what sins or political circumstances have led Trudeau to this point, or if he has any redeeming qualities. Personally, I'm glad to see him gone.
Uh really? Is this another version of “Both sides” claiming you don’t know the pulse whilst amplifying a more right leaning, niche, view?
Niche view? Nobody likes Trudeau, not even is own party that is why they are pressuring him to step down. The comment you are commenting on might not be well thought out or in depth but it is how MANY average Canadians feel.
I, for 1 sec, thought you said press Crtl F to pay respects.
Trudeau is like the Obama of Canada. His only redeeming quality is that he has now resigned.
Is it me or does it seem like the internet era has taken away incumbent advantage and actually put incumbents at a massive disadvantage? I'm not here to attack or defend what Trudeau has actually done, only to posit the idea that once you become a leader in the political landscape there is a very effective machine whose only job is to attack you, personally, as much as possible anywhere you're perceived to be vulnerable. If you've followed US politics for the last decade the perfect example of this is "tan suit".
It works both ways.
When Trudeau first took office, he was the meme of being Canada's young and handsome PM, and he enjoyed a good few years of "honeymoon" period that many leaders can only wish for.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=2015+justin+trudeau+handsome&df=20...
I think the problem is that a large and growing part of the population is in a constant state of dissatisfaction, if not downright anger, often being fed or demanding simple solutions to complex problems. At that point it doesn't seem to matter if those solutions actually work as long as they promise change. And when it becomes clear they won't or require long term planning people will just demand new leadership and the cycle continues.
Let's face it. Most problems require patient approaches. Often changes that are made won't show their effects until years or decades later. Unfortunately that encourages short term thinking towards the next election in government and population alike.
It's an interesting theory, but there are other hypotheses out there. One I've heard a lot is that the post-pandemic inflation surge hit everyone, and made all incumbents unpopular. I suppose that if the anti-incumbent results across the globe continue for several more years, we will be able to rule that out?
It's also easier to lie about what the current government has done wrong, there are no laws against it.
You can just lie at a velocity never seen before on this planet, spread falsehoods via social media, breed outrage, spread conspiracies and then elected.
It's disgusting.
From https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/on-this-day-the-first-bi...
"The bitterness and rivalries seen in the partisan 1796 campaign got worse in the 1800 rematch between Adams and Jefferson. At one point in that race, Jefferson’s supporter, notorious pamphleteer James Calendar, claimed that Adams was a hermaphrodite, while Adams’ people said Jefferson would openly promote prostitution, incest, and adultery..."
Inflation, distrust of authorities after COVID, deliberate (and automated) spread of disinformation, outright war in Europe, climate change becoming increasingly obvious with nobody doing anything about it (but people very angry any time somebody attempts to do something about it... etc)
It's not a fun time, and I'd hate to be "in charge"
I assume "tan suit" is referring to:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama_tan_suit_controve...
I follow US politics regularly, but I hadn't heard of this so I don't know how well it's known... but it has it's own page so maybe I'm in the minority here.
I was definitely around and followed politics during the Obama administration, and I don't ever recall hearing a word about this.
Probably big in some circles, unnoticed in others.
Might depend on your age? Were you politically active in the Obama period? Even as a Canadian I heard about this.
That and his choice of mustard, and other things. The "Thanks, Obama!" ads, and so on
Unfortunately the bitter partisan divide really amped up in that period, and we're living with the fallout still.
The machine isn't against the incumbent, it wants to move things to the right. This is why Obama gets mainstream media outrage for superficial things like wearing a tan suit. Also it is why Biden (correctly) got a lot of negative coverage for being too old to serve but people like Trump or Kay Ivey relatively get a pass.
The right also had incumbent disadvantage this year. See:
- Britain's Tory defeat.
- India's and Hungary's main party still winning, but by less than expected. India's main party no longer holds a majority in Parliament.
- In South Korea, the liberal opposition has won the majority of seats in the National Assembly.
Even in developing countries, incumbent disadvantage is almost everywhere. Look at the map in https://abcnews.go.com/538/democrats-incumbent-parties-lost-.... And in a couple examples where the majority gained (Mexico, Dominican Republic, Moldova) they are the left.
As an Indian, I was suprised to learn at first that anti-incumbency wasn't the norm across the world. It is not such a bad thing.
Indeed, Trudeau had the whole state-funded media to use as his propaganda apparatus on his side - and it's why free speech is under threat trying in Canada and elsewhere, them trying to manufacture consent by so-called "hate speech" for the fascists to gain more control to censor-suppress dissidents who see what they really are.
He has not (yet) resigned. He has announced his intention to resign. He will step down when a new leader is selected via the internal Liberal leadership race. Additionally, Parliament is prorogued until March 24 via his request of the Governor-General.
“Trudeau to resign as prime minister after Liberal leadership race”
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/trudeau-news-conference-1.7...
True, but this is normal; two other Prime Ministers have taken this approach over the last 30 years, Brian Mulroney and Jean Chretien both announced their intention to resign, and then held leadership conventions to select a new party leader before actually resigning.
I was clarifying since the original headline (‘Trudeau resigns’) would be misleading to many and especially to an international audience with different types of leadership (eg a president) - especially since the original source for this was the British broadcaster. While it’s not the norm, he would still have the ability to resign immediately and have someone act in the interim (unless I’m mistaken) until the new leader is selected or force a new election.
(The new link and headline are now accurate and reflect the actual situation.)
[flagged]
[flagged]
He could also have resigned immediately. He could also have called early elections. There are several ways the Canadian process works.
Current canuck here.
Since Trudeau has been elected the likelihood of purchasing a home or finding a job has drastically reduced and continues to fall. Rising tides raise all boats, given that the rent has risen everywhere too.
This creates a divide between the have and have-nots of property ownership and public or private employment. This divides ends in the individuals who have are happy since their investment skyrocketed while the have-nots are left with no hope for their future.
As for employment, the primary job growth is in public sector (government jobs) which are ultimately a parasitic value add to the economy.
Given this, it's easy to see the negative sentiment in Trudeau and his cabinet. This sentiment seems to have hit a crescendo with the recent release of the over-shot budget deficit.
Thoughts?
This is almost identical to the US economy, we have decent job growth... until you remove government jobs. It's really insidious how the current setup kills small businesses and drives everyone to government work, if this trend continues will the government just slowly consume everything?
Washington D.C. now is only behind SF and Seattle in average income. If you want money you either work for a sector that is booming or the government.
Almost all sectors in the US have seen job growth. Gov jobs have led in growth, but if you take out gov jobs, the US still sees job growth.
Hm, I'm unfamiliar with the public:private job ratio in the US. I'd imagine other industries bolster the US more (tech being an obvious one)? Whereas in Canada our biggest industries have dwindled and we typically lose our knowledge-based workers to you gosh darn freedom lovers!
Speaking as US citizen, what policies/legislation could Trudeau have reasonably enacted to alleviate the housing/job market? It's been pretty rough stateside as far as real estate goes, but it doesn't seem like a solution will materialize (that is to say, there's no solution that avoids hurting the wallets of the people in charge).
I'm no economist by any means but most armchair experts I interact tend to believe that this drive in pricing comes from low yield government spending, increased immigration and of course lower rate of residences being built.
IMO, altering immigration levels would have the most tangible affect on the housing and jobs (unsure about the US). I'm not bullish on the idea that we can build residences quickly and the government spending is hard to control with poor financial auditing among the current administration.
>Thoughts?
and prayers!
One of my big issues with J.T. is his massive waste of money on gun control. The vast majority of guns used in crimes in Canada are illegal guns from the US, with most being hand guns.
The Liberals under J.T. has proposed a ban on assault style weapons (not assault weapons, mind you which are already banned) that so far has cost over $70M without guns being collected. The estimate cost is over $800M to collect them.
The last time we had a gun control fantasy was also under the Liberals. They proposed a long gun registry that they estimated would cost $2M a year. By the time it was cancelled 20 years later, the total cost was over $2B.
This is one area leftists and right wingers can agree on -- gun control doesn't work, it punishes minority communities, it targets the wrong things, and it's written in ways that aren't backed by data.
Leftists want to be armed for community defense (and because Marx and other leftist writers wrote about the importance of being armed).
That said, if I show up at the range with a pride flag on my rifle people lose their shit about it, so I guess we have a ways to go before we've got left-right solidarity there.
I forgot to mention, but the 'assault style weapons' are legal currently. All of the owners have proper licenses, have background checks, and are registered with the government.
There is something incredibly amusing to me about hearing Karl Marx described as a "leftist writer"
Is he not?
I hadn't heard that this was likely to happen. Any Canadians here able to weigh on whether this was expected or is a normal procedure for your elected officials?
Generally, governments in Canada are voted out in roughly 9-year intervals. Trudeau took office in 2015, so nothing unusual there. Moreover, Trudeau is exiting with approval ratings just a percent below his predecessor, Stephen Harper (22% vs. 23%, respectively). So, in a wider sense, this is not so unusual. But we're facing a trade war with the States and less-than-joking threats of annexation, so it's a bad moment to have our leadership in a shakeup.
This is the crux of the issue honestly. Trudeau should have had the humility to read the writing on the wall in the fall, and stepped down so we could have a stable government to deal with the incoming US administration and give his party a fighting chance next election.
He could have rested on his laurels knowing history would likely forget his shortcomings & scandals, and be remembered as the prime minister who got us legal weed, navigated the covid pandemic, brought clean drinking water to FN reserves and advanced social programs (childcare, dental care).
Instead he's likely going to be known as the prime minister who had to be forcibly walked to the door by Canadians and his party, while leaving the country in a precarious position during tumultuous times.
Here's the primary problem with your argument: the current front-runner to win the next election is the Conservative Party of Canada, with Pierre Poilievre as leader, and pretty much a shoo-in for the next Prime Minister.
Poilievre is a career politician who's only professional experience has been as a politician, has no work history to speak of (don't take my word for it, his wikipedia entry details only a job as a collection agent, and that he started a business in 2003 focused on political communications, and then was elected in 2004).
Poilievre has spent the last several years in the lead up to becoming the party leader for the CPC cozying up to the alt-right, supporting the anti-vax movement, and hasn't published any meaningful policy documentation.
Poilievre is basically the last man standing from Stephen Harpers administration (in terms of policies and practices), and has failed to drive or pass any meaningful legislation or policy changes in his 20 year career. His victory in the 2022 CPC leadership campaign was a landslide, but also suffered from allegations of foreign interference from India and China. There is still an outstanding report on foreign interference due on January 31st.
Trudeau's greatest mistake was not implementing the electoral change he campaigned on, which likely would have marked a long term shift toward more left leaning social policies along side centrist fiscal policies, which have typically characterized Canadian society. Unfortunately, unless a very compelling alternative to the CPC emerges in the next 3 months, we will most likely get a government lead by a sock-puppet who lacks any real strength to negotiate with a presumably hostile incoming US administration, and the official party line from other Conservative groups in Canada appears to be appeasement and concession.
It's gonna be a rough couple of years :/
(edited for shoe-in)
> Trudeau's greatest mistake was not implementing the electoral change he campaigned on
Agreed. In an over-simplification,
- first past the post is the best for the Conservatives. (It was best for the Liberals before the Reform & Conservatives merged).
- single transferable is the best for the Liberals
- mixed-member proportional is the best for the NDP
Trudeau thought the electoral commission would give him the STV he wanted, but it was going to deliver MMP that would pretty much guarantee that he would have to coalition with the NDP. So he nixed it. He ended up with an NDP coalition anyways, so he didn't gain anything through the nixing. Instead FPTP is going to result in a Conservative landslide in 2025.
I voted Liberal in 2015. Because of that betrayal, I never have since or will in future.
I wish you and others had just considered the NDP platform which has always supported electoral reform (MMP) and cannabis legalization. Two planks the Liberals "stole" in order to win (and one which they then promptly threw away).
Mulcair was ahead in the polls first half of that election. Trudeau came out of third place to win with his lie about electoral reform and by refusing to answer the question about the religious discrimination laws being introduced in Quebec.
Things could have gone very differently. Mulcair was a much more competent politician than Trudeau, and the NDP platform was more balanced. Though it may have been a challenge for him to assemble a fully competent cabinet.
Look at the NDP party this last term for their true colors. A leader who in his own words votes against a no-confidence vote made up of his very own words. Is an equal partner in every decision the liberal government made this term with their coalition.
A wolf in sheep disguise. I didn't want PP to be the next prime minister for comments in parent of the thread, but who else is going to win this running now?
I guess I'm not sure how you can fully square the two statements here.
- You don't want PP to be PM
- You're angry at the NDP for not voting to bring Trudeau down (and effectively make PP the PM)
I share your frustration with the NDP under Singh. But I'm not sure what alternative he has, tactically. Voting down the government at this juncture would only have led to an election that would have brought PP to power as PM. Which is notably not in the NDP's interests. (Or, I'd argue, the public's)
But, yes, I understand it tactically. But it's strategically inept. For 4 years the NDP has "won the battle but lost the war" -- all the policy planks they forced the Liberals to adopt will simply be dismantled by the conservatives now.
What they were hoping for is some recognition from the public that the progressive moves made by the Liberals in the last parliament were in fact NDP initiatives forced on them. Instead they're just tarred and feathered with the same image that Trudeau has.
Justin Trudeau was a ski instructor before becoming Prime Minister.
Ronald Reagan and Zelenskyy were ridiculed as an actor in their election campaigns.
Poilievre is a career politician and unproven at the highest office, but that by itself should not disqualify him. Knowing who to delegate to is 90% the job of a good leader -- the other 10% is public speaking and being charismatic.
Sure, Trudeau was a ski instructor. You will also note that I neglected to mention that Poilievre had a paper route; that's because paper routes aren't professional experience.
Trudeau was also a secondary school teacher, acted in a tv movie. He also reputedly worked as a bouncer and worked in various (heavily politically affiliated) non-profits. He had a career before politics.
That said, my primary point is that Poilievre hasn't been a particularly effective politician, and his reputation is largely that of a blowhard who's main appeal is that he is not Trudeau.
>main appeal is that he is not Trudeau.
Which is a plus considering how much Trump hates Trudeau.
Poilievre gives off too much Milhouse energy, which I'm not sure if good or bad for obsequiousing.
Trudeau also dressed up in black face and brown face. Not many country leaders can claim that...
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-49763805
shoo-in*
Neither Freeland nor Carney want to be the next Kim Campbell. The Liberals are going to lose the next election badly whether or not Trudeau is leading it. I'm sure that Trudeau made the decision to step down ~6 months ago and is now just playing with the timing to maximum effect. Stepping down now basically pushes the election three months further out than it would otherwise be due to a prorogation to pick a new leader. That gives Pollievre 3 more months worth of rope and Trump time to sabotage Pollievre.
Yeah my expectation is this next leadership campaign will be half-assed and "fought" by people who know they will never be PM. Instead they'll expect 4-5 years of PP and somewhere in the middle another leadership campaign that they'll then try to win.
I do think Freeland is too tainted by Trudeau now to be a success. Very intelligent woman, but I think her political career is ending. (I should check back on this comment in 5 years)
I agree she's tainted which makes her a bad choice to be his successor. But people have short memories and I think in 3-4 years the Trudeau stains will have washed off. In that time she'll have a chance to make a name for herself.
I think if she wanted she could very well be a contender in the next election cycle.
Trudeau should have resigned after getting a second minority government. I mean, actually he should not have run that election at all. But in general in our history, failure to get a majority can be forgiven once... but twice? The knives come out.
I'm amazed at the dominance he has over his party that has made it possible for him still to be hanging on. Even his resignation is slow motion.
> less-than-joking threats of annexation
This is an interesting statement in that, sadly, the person making the threats is not joking yet to those that have not drunk the kool-aid it is an utter joke of a concept.
The President is technically the commander-in-chief of the armed forces in the US. His opinion carries weight, fortunately or unfortunately.
the president is biden, and biden has not made such jokes. the president elect has made them, but he is not currently commander-in-chief. he may atop making those jokes once he has power
I like the use of technically here leaving the hint that some might not go along with those orders even if the technical commander did give them. This is more chilling with Kelly's revelations of Trump's desire to have a specific type of general
That's because I believe Congress still needs to approve before the US can go to war.
You mean both chambers that are now in control by his party?
Also, a president doesn't have to declare war to engage in military conflict.
"For the United States, Article One, Section Eight of the Constitution says "Congress shall have power to ... declare War." However, that passage provides no specific format for what form legislation must have in order to be considered a "declaration of war" nor does the Constitution itself use this term. In the courts, the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, in Doe v. Bush, said: "[T]he text of the October Resolution itself spells out justifications for a war and frames itself as an 'authorization' of such a war."[2] in effect saying an authorization suffices for declaration and what some may view as a formal congressional "Declaration of War" was not required by the Constitution. "
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_of_war_by_the_Unit...
Valid points, indeed.
...unless they decide to just have Pentagon lawyers print up a lot of paper that says whatever they're doing falls under existing authorizations that consistently get renewed without debate.
Maybe they can go on a hunt for WMDs in the great white north???
There is no reason to annex Canada when it's economy can simply be bought and controlled.
Eg: Nexen was bought by CNOOC with a whole bunch of promises and broke lots of them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CNOOC_Petroleum_North_America
> those that have not drunk the kool-aid it is an utter joke of a concept
Problem is that they aren't the ones in power in the USA.
Right, but even if the US actually wants to annex Canada, Canada would have to allow that to happen. That's what makes it insane. Russia wanted to annex Ukraine, and it didn't go so well. So playing the tape to the end, what do people think Trump is actually proposing? A war? A "special operation"?
It didn't go so well because the US and the rest of Europe resisted the invasion of Ukraine.
Who will help Canada? They'll be blockaded on day one by both land and sea. They won't have any food.
A whole group of countries joined together and came to the aid of Kuwait when Iraq attempted to annex them.
Edit: are you suggesting that Europe would not come to the aid of Canada just because it's Canada or because they would be going against the US? The rest of the world could turn around and isolate the US with sanctions and tariffs at a minimum. Would that be worth it for the US?
And who in their right mind would come to defend Canada against the US if it comes to it? It would be suicide on any country's part, plain and simple.
Well... if we're living in a imaginary/video game world where US invades Canada it wouldn't be too far fetched to expect Britain and France to intervene? I mean which is more absurd?
At that point, Mexico could run up the middle and take back what was taken from it. That would be chef's kiss response to Trump
Who in their right mind would not? If im the leader of a European country, and I see the US go rogue and annex their closest neighbour and longest ally, thats a clear message that the US can not be trusted.
Sure, but in that case you might be more preoccupied with securing your own position rather than risking intervention on a continent you have no foothold in.
Securing your own position is contingent on having a proper deterrence to US invasion or belligerence. Unless you are thinking of appeasing them, but I doubt that European defense minds would consider that.
You realize most European armies have tons of US equipment right? They are barely able to hold back Russia, with US help. Now they're supposed to build up their domestic DIB, hold off Russia, and fight a war on unfamiliar territory?
I doubt they'd adopt outright appeasement, but they would be walking very cautiously.
I do realize that. The war in Ukraine is not being supported by Nato. They are sending supplies but the alliance is not entering Ukraine against Russia so as to not create a wider conflict. Note that Ukraine is not a NATO signatory while Canada is. In the case of the US annexing Canada,the strategic analysis would give two options. Either immediately oppose US aggression and form a bloc independent of them, or tacitly approve of it and leave yourself open to the same thing happening to you and your neighbours.
Sending munitions/equipment to one side means that you support that side ;)
I do not know what kind of mental gymnastics you make when you say NATO doesn't support the war in Ukraine, but it actually does - with the NATO SG going to Ukraine in a show of support.
AFAIK, there is no precedent to what will happen if a NATO country attacks another NATO country - we came close to that when the Turks and the Greeks almost started fighting a few years back.
Even more equipment if they force US troops to abandon their posts and their equipment as they are all now PNG from whatever country we have foreign bases.
Any country or group with a grievance. It would be open season. Lots of soft targets in the US that could give people pause in their support for Operation Canadian Bacon
The King of Canada would probably want to defend his people regardless of the cost.
The British Armed Forces swear an oath of allegiance to the King not the British government.
If he says go, they go.
It would be a gamble for even Trump that Britain can't launch nukes to defend a Commonwealth ally (obviously that would probably be the end of the UK but we've faced that before, eh).
This conversation is so stupid though.
> It would be a gamble for even Trump that Britain can't launch nukes to defend a Commonwealth ally (obviously that would probably be the end of the UK but we've faced that before, eh)
As I initially asked: would you be willing to end your own country just because you feel like you need to defend another country on another continent against an adversary you have no chance of beating?
The entire point of NATO and other treaties is that every signatory is willing to risk their country to protect the other signatories. It makes the game theory choice to attack stupid.
But it’s all academic anyways. The US military would eagerly lead a coup before willingly attacking the UK or Canada, particularly if non-conventional means are threatened.
Consider that nearly every officer has done several war games or exercises alongside UK or Canadian officers. This is true both of NCOs and senior leadership. Being friendly with their armed forces is institutional. It would be easier to convince the Marines to attack the Army than to convince them to attack their Canadian counterparts.
Armed forces are friendly to who they are being ordered to be friendly. And they don't have a an issue with any other armed forces unless being ordered to have an issue.
And US armed forces have been ordered to be friendly to UK and Canadian armed forces since WWI over 100 years ago (and even more friendly since WWII).
That doesn’t go away quickly without good reason even with new orders.
An attack on a Anglophone Five Eyes NATO member is militarily close to a civil war and could rapidly lead to a civil war.
Me personally? Doesn't matter what I'd do. I'm just some gobshite on the internet.
In this hypothetical situation the opinions that matter are those of the men in the subs that have just seen their family and friends wiped out.
They've got roughly 120 active warheads to play with and realistically no one is going to stop them all.
So if you add up the damage from that plus the loss of a major trading partner and military ally it kind of seems unlikely to be a profitable venture for anyone involved.
Yes, it's the internet and we can discuss of a lot of outcomes if Trump decides Canada is too big for the Canadians to have all for themselves.
I think it would be a bigger loss for the UK to do something stupid than for the US do to something stupid.
I guess we have to see how it plays out with Greenland - most likely scenario would be he'd go after Greenland first if it ever comes to that.
Kuwait is nowhere near comparable. Btw that coalition of countries... Who led it?
If the rest of the world refused to trade with the US over this, the US would have a helluva time and struggle. No bullets need to be expended.
Why is this hard to comprehend?
Russia is an even smaller economy than the US, and even then many countries continue to trade with them despite their aggression.
Sanctions hurt everyone involved. If China stopped trading with the US, their economy would tank too.
Furthermore, there are ways around sanctions.
The US is much more self-sufficient than Russia.
It is not hard to comprehend, but it is also not a surefire way to deter an invasion.
And of course remember that not all actors on the stage will behave "rationally"... US leadership especially.
If the US were in this position, any country that had sanctions that were only there at the urging from the US would be dropped. Even if they were not dropped, those that were sanctioned would immediately start ignoring them. Hell, most of Europe would probably immediately starting buying oil/gas from Russia.
if the world was going to cut trade with the US, it would have over the iraq invasion.
I dont think there would be a military intervention, and if there were, I dont think it would be verry successful. NATO would be crippled without the US.
That said, of course it isnt worth it for the US.
They could invoke Article 5 of NATO; that would trigger Article 8;, expelling USA from NATO and requiring all remaining member to come to Canada's aid.
>In the case of any contradiction with other international obligations (with the exception of the United Nations, which by Article 7 supersedes NATO), or in military conflict of two NATO members, Article 8 comes into force. This is most important in cases should one member engage in military action against another member, upon which the offending members would be held in abeyance of the treaty and thereby NATO protection as a whole.
Words on a page don't put boots on the ground. The treaty would be invoked, US would be expelled (and sanctioned), and nobody would dare try to break the blockade.
The only meaningful resistance would come from within the US military, or maybe China would finally venture out of their sphere of influence (although it's more likely they'll use the opportunity to pursue more regional concentration of power).
Even if they achieve it, the reputational damage would be hard to understate. I think anyone with a bone to pick with the States would happily and repeatedly point to us Canadians as an example of what happens when you trust Americans. And that would be enough to achieve a lot of their regional policy goals, if not much more. Mexico would probably seek other political partners to make sure they're not next.
Yes, an American invasion of Canada would immeidately set the stage for a worldwide rationale for opposing US interests.
Annexation of Canada would mean the end of the soft power for the Americans. The only way anyone would let them in would be through hard wars.
At least China and Russia only forcibly attacked independent countries that were once united with them.
Which wouldn't matter much because Canada and Europe rely on US military, equipment, and IT and the US is an ocean away.
The US imports most of its oil while exporting the oil it produces. Ooops.
The US imports pretty much everything consumers consume. Ooops
The US would have nobody to sell anything to. Ooops
The US is now in a local conflict that a very large % of citizens does not support. What happens after the next election?
These are good points, but I have to comment that all of these suggest the physical resistance to an annexation would come from domestic actors rather than international.
Let me be clear, there are 1,001 reasons why annexing Canada would be a bad idea. I'm just saying that military impossibility is not one of them.
It is a fun fictional exercise, ala Man in the Highcastle
I think it would be closer to Handmaid's Tale than Highcastle since it's a modern day than a twist WWII ending
fun and interesting either way. I hear netflix potential
> expelling USA from NATO
which would suit Trump just fine. this isn't a dissuading argument to Trump, and would probably be considered as bonus to his lot.
Would anyone really want to oppose America though?
Come on. Canada grows, and is a major exporter of, food, and has all the infrastructure and fuel needed to process and distribute it.
There would be significantly less variety, and no tea or coffee, but that is not the same as not having any food.
> and less-than-joking threats of annexation
If Poilievre gets elected, will he willingly join the USA? It seems that the world is more and more aligned by political spectrum rather than national allegiance.
Not being a part of the states is our national identity. It’s just very fringe minority who dabbles with the idea of joining the USA.
I think the Overton window has become much easier to slide around with social media influence campaigns. If someone powerful wants something -- even if it's against everyone else's interests -- it's now much easier for them to drum up popular support for it through underhanded tactics. Remember that Brexit started as a joke.
"Remember that Brexit started as a joke."
Did it? Stickers or posters saying "keep our Pound!" were common on bus stops and street lights as a kid in the Home Counties in the 90s. Newspapers ran (mostly untrue) stories about market fruit stands needing to sell bananas by the KG rather than by the lb. Both the Tories and Labour had Euroskeptic wings since the 1970s.
Rightly or wrongly, the undercurrent of Brexit was there from the start of the EU and ebbed or flowed based on events of the day.
That's a great point; I'm glad you added that context and I'll take back that characterisation. I was mostly speaking through the lens of Farage's antics, and lacked the viewpoint of someone from the UK proper.
I forgot about the metric martyrs!
Brexit wasnt a joke, it was the culmination of decades of anti-EU sentiment in the UK.
Everyone gets manipulated one way or another. It’s up to the person to carry the weight and responsibility of their actions.
When it comes to US - Canada relations, if Canadians decide to be a part of the states, then it’s their will. I don’t support it, but if super majority changes their minds… well, we live in a democracy, and such is the will of people.
Frankly, I think US is in a panic mode as they realize they can’t outcompete China anytime soon by themselves. So they’re trying every possible thing to see what sticks to increase their chances.
China is also in panic mode because of internal issues that stem from the younger generation’s dissatisfaction. Natural fix is to claim some wins to rally and unite people. So the ideas of reunification, playing to win in manufacturing, showing how much better they can overcome the economical problems using their 1B population are on the play now.
For whatever reason, I think the common lives of people who live in countries that play for both sides will be the only ones that get elevated. And frankly, I think, Canada should do the same.
This is my analysis too. Trump is all about brinkmanship. Scare everyone else and bring them to the edge of the precipice that you know they dont want to go over. Then extract concessions. Its desperation, not sustainable, but it works as long as you have the upper hand.
Agreed, it definitely works. But given the absolute numbers of population in other countries, I’m not sure how long it can last. Alienate the allies, make them get together, and join the competitor, as you’re being very unreliable.
Thats the question. How much does Trump actually understand the context and how far will he go?
I think he understands quite a bit. People on his team are very far from being stupid. They’re all playing the “populist game in the streets” to garner support, but it doesn’t seem like they have a strategy laid out to confront the upcoming problems.
No and he has seriously opposed this and takes the 'jokes' seriously, as he should
I haven’t been following the news recently. What is the talk of annexation? First I’ve heard of it.
US should take the areas below the 47 degree Lat N. The rest can remain Canada. And please Keep Quebec too.
Or maybe Canada should pull a Russia and sell the Northwest Territories and Yukon. That would generate a lot of interest and money.
There's a good summary here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada%E2%80%93United_States_r...
At least one Canadian business magnate (Kevin O'Leary) has tried to position himself in on the deal and visited Trump at Mar-a-Lago to talk details.
https://nationalpost.com/news/politics/kevin-oleary-donald-t...
If this is true and Canada has not arrested O’Leary then they’ve already shown how weak they are to naked sedition and it’s only a matter of time before something terrible happens.
As far as I'm aware we have no laws about going and making a moron out of yourself advocating for giving the country away. Nor do I particularly think we need any, morons can be morons, the rest of us can ignore them (and I say this as someone strongly against the idea of joining the states).
Naked sedition would be promoting an actual invasion, not just floating the idea of Canada joining as the 51st state voluntarily and figuring out the logistics of how that could happen (which as far as I can tell is all this is).
We don't have an equivalent of the American Logan Act that would make this illegal.
I don't think there's any need to arrest anyone as a show of strength. I don't feel the threat of an actual American invasion and I like living in a free society that doesn't go around arresting people for political show. Most of us are offended by Kevin being a self appointed negotiator on behalf of Canada but it's not like government is bound by anything he says so if he wants to talk in private with Trump as a private citizen so be it.
Canadians do not want this and most don't even find it funny.
Since December, Trump has repeatedly "joked" on social media about Canada being the 51st US state and Trudeau being a "Governor".
The whole thing is pretty stupid, but Trump is so chaotic that chances of bad things happening are feeling somewhat above zero.
Trump
I feel like a single word should explain it, but I know HN abhors single word responses. Trump has threatened tariffs and has mentioned annexing Canada. He's also mentioned buying Greenland, trading Puerto Rico for Greenland, and a bunch of other notions.
Taking back the Panama Canal comes to mind.
It seems to me that he really wants to do some empire building, but hasn't figured out a way that people would actually accept (and isn't interested in the modern version of treaty based "empires").
To me, the canal thing is the only thing he's mentioned that is possible. There's a stipulation that does allow for that, just like there's a stipulation that the crown can do away with parliament in the UK. Doesn't mean it's an unlikely provision to be invoked without a lot of negative baggage to the point they are not likely to happen.
In fairness, the US paid for the Panama Canal and have continued to sustain it despite no "ownership".
Panama is only relevant because of the US investment in the Canal and they claim ownership when it suits them and then cry poverty every time investments need to be made.
Panama is currently playing with fire by courting foreign interest that doesn't align with the US, who are effectively their paymasters.
It's not a sudden "empire-building" move by the US. The fact that the canal exists at all has always been because of the US Empire. Panama is playing a dangerous game of FA&FO.
You can replace Panama with Ukraine, or Taiwan. The double standard is getting out of control. Respect for Trump for laying it as it is without all the BS.
Trump is just throwing out every threat he can. There's simply no realistic way to unilaterally take Canada, or the canal, or Greenland.
Greenland actually makes a lot of sense. I think if every citizen there was offered $5million they’d vote yes. And it’s entirely reasonable from the USA perspective as it’s not that much overall for the US.
Probably wouldn’t make a state but treat like Puerto Rico where they continue to self govern and citizens can freely move to the USA as they’d have USA passports.
For USA very strategic naval passages and mineral extraction.
It’s not that crazy really and I think there’s a deal that’s mutually beneficial where everyone wins and is better off long term.
China buying the US actually makes a lot of sense. I think if every citizen there was offered $5million they’d vote yes.
They could try for form an offer but I simply don't think they have the money to do it.
Normal people would try to negotiate trade relations. Megalomaniacs would decide to just take something even if they try to soften the taking with money.
[flagged]
The USA bought stolen land from those that stole it. People often forget about that fact.
100% of land in the history of humanity has been either bought or stolen. What exactly is your point?
> I think if every citizen there was offered $5million they’d vote yes. And it’s entirely reasonable from the USA perspective as it’s not that much overall for the US.
That's almost $300 billion dollars?
A pittance
Is it, though?
More than made up for in 'savings' from killing off Medicare. But realistically, you don't really need to balance a budget sheet when you can just print more of that principle currency on demand.
On top of the suspected tax cuts to boot
Annexation is not a joke?
Looking at Canadian polls might indicate some things: https://338canada.com/districts.htm
Particularly look at the projected Liberal seat count.
This gov was propped up by a supply agreement with the NDP in order to maintain parlimentary confidence. The NDP leader becomes eligible for a generous pension scheme if he stays an MP to some point in February. As such the timing for all this is no coincidence, and people have been expecting this for a while, but it is shocking just how shamelessly self serving it all is.
The NDP party does not want a Conservative landslide government either, regardless of Mr. Singh’s pension.
As others have said, this came after historically significant low popularity and mounting political pressures. His government faced criticism over falling poll numbers, by-election losses, and a broken agreement with the NDP. Tensions with the US and internal dissent within the Liberal party added to his challenges.
One of the final nails in the coffin was the resignation of Chrystia Freeland, his last standing ally and Finance Minister.
This video from CBC a couple weeks ago on Freeland explains the rifts in Trudeau's government well https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SuZTLWNlpc
Yes and yes.
Canadian prime ministers often expire after 10 years for one reason or another
There will likely be an election in 3ish months with a new liberal leader in place of Trudeau
> There will likely be an election in 3ish months
At earliest, May 5th (March 24th parliament comes back, instantly votes no confidence, governor general issues writ the same day, the shortest possible campaign period is 37 days and election day must fall on a Monday).
At latest, Oct 27th (regularly scheduled election is Oct 20th, but that might be delayed by 7 days due to scheduling conflicts - see Bill C-65).
Likely somewhere in between there. All the opposition parties have been signalling that they intend to vote no confidence. Assuming that doesn't change though, there's likely at least a few days lag between parliament coming back, and that happening. The campaign period is likely not to be as short as possible (with an allowable range of 37 to 51 days).
"Canadian federal governments tend to last 6 months, or 10 years. After 10 years the roof falls in"
Yes. It's pretty normal in the Westminster system and more generally in Parliamentary systems.
Was it expected? Eh - kind of. In the last few weeks much of Trudeau's cabinet has resigned or voiced their disapproval. NDP has signaled they would support bringing down the government.
Its been expected since before the Christmas break. There was a cabinet reshuffle, and its come out he's lost the support of his finance minister Chrystia Freeland, wasn't able to replace her with Marc Carney his top choice as Carney seems to be distancing himself from the current Govt on top of public support being at an all time low.
Both the opposition Conservatives and the supporting NDP parties (NDP in particular was holding up the Liberal Minority Govt) have been planning non-confidence motions this month that would result in a new election.
There was no path to victory for Trudeau after that, so the next best move is to resign and hope the liberals can pick a new leader before the next electoral cycle is too far along and avoid the issue the Democrats had by rushing to select a replacement candidate and alienating some portion of voters by doing so.
Yup, I hear the top candidates to replace him are Chrystia Freeland or Marc Carney (maybe known to this community since he's on Stripe's board). These top candidates might not accept to play this round though as the chances of winning are slim in the current circumstances. Some people are calling the next leader of the party a "sacrificial lamb".
Its very possible the next candidate inherits the overall sentiment and is indeed a 'sacrificial lamb'. The anti-Trudeau sentiment is high, but if he steps back its an open question if the left wing/ABC crowd and centrists revisit their support for the liberal party.
IMO Chrystia Freeland would be a great pick for the country. She was firm and capable during the NAFTA/USMCA renegotiations, and seems to have stood up against political games from the current administration to her eventual detriment of losing her cabinet position.
Marc Carney certainly has appeal, but I can't help but see him as Ignatief 2.0 and that didn't go well with many Canadians.
Neither of them can reverse the Liberal fortunes.
Chrystia Freeland was too close to Trudeau for too long (their fallout notwithstanding) to be perceived as anything than Trudeau 2.0
Marc Carney is a (two time!) head of a central bank - he hasn't got a chance in the current anti-elite climate.
You are very likely correct.
Then again I'm on the fence on Freeland, as are most of my circle as anecdotal as that is. Our issues with Trudeau don't completely extend to her, and if she differentiates herself well enough along a few lines she might get more support than traditionally expected from a Trudeau cabinet member.
Or maybe that's wishful thinking. Our alternatives haven't done much in the way of proposing a viable alternative path and have focused almost explicitly on criticizing Trudeau and the parties actions. Its appealing to the "fuck trudeau" flag flyers but I do wonder if centrists will find the CPC appealing without a change in direction and messaging now Trudeau is leaving.
All the Canadians that I talk to (including some CBC news employees) have been insistent that this was an eventuality and also that he would drag it out to do it as embarrassingly as possible.
Yes, once they can not lead their party effectively they will usually resign. It has been building to this over the last month or so.
Highly expected - he was trying to put it off to get to the convention without having to trigger an election.
This was definitely expected, people within and outside of the party have been calling for Trudeau to resign for a while and that chorus has been getting louder and picking up more prominent figures.
I suppose standard procedure in a Westminster parliament is to have a non confidence vote and an election - which is what the opposition parties said would happen when Parliament sits again. Poroguing parliament and having a leadership race is probably a way to try and avoid that or at least go into the election with a less unpopular leader.
Proguing parliament is probably the best thing for the liberal party to avoid an election with an unpopular leader. But I don't think it's good for Canada as it states down Trump's tariffs
It’s expected and it is normal.
There is no term limit for PM or members of parliament.
They stay on until they lose the support of their party.
He lost the support of his party due to his extreme unpopularity and the impact it will have on the future election. As seen by polls and bye elections.
More often the leader loses party support after an election loss.
However in this case, a loss is so likely and expected to be so bad that his party would rather go to the polls with a different leader.
Canadian here. It's certainly not normal. News broke yesterday that this was coming. The opposition kept tabling no confidence votes and trying to get an early election called... and Trudeau's approval rating is so low that it might even be the lowest of any Prime Minister in history (though I don't know so if someone does by all means fact check that).
However, our upcoming election is this year. It certainly does not surprise me that Trudeau is stepping down from leader of the Liberal party in light of the polling, since the polls are predicting that if an election were called today, the conservatives would win in such a landslide that I don't think many countries have even seen that before. Of course polling and actual election results are two very different things... but I think the Liberal party sees the writing on the wall. If they hope to have any shot of getting re-elected, they can't do it with Trudeau at the head.
... but that doesn't necessarily mean that we all saw him resigning as PM incumbent coming. He's also proroguing parliament until March. This is probably a move to get the other parties to step back and "STFU"; to not pass any motions during the party shift (particularly related to calling an early election etc).
Lastly, as others have said, the PM position is usually held for an average of 9-10 years (and that's multiple terms .. most incumbents just get re-elected into second and third terms). Trudeau was elected in 2015 so he's about due to exit anyway if we go by averages (though some have served longer).
1% below Stephen Harper, which is bad, but not unprecedented bad.
I think if the liberals can delay the election until October, their results won't be so bad, especially if Trump keeps saying dumb things down in America (as he is prone to do), making alignment with the conservatives less popular (they will still win, just not the huge landslide that they can take now).
The approval rating seems like an unhelpful metric here if the actual resulting election is such a landslide.
Also I think there is a bit of a different here between Harpers Conservatives and Tredeaus Liberals.
In 2015 people were actually really excited and hopeful about Justin Trudeau (sounds weird to say but it is true). He was voted in "positively" based on legalizing cannabis & election reform.
2025 is a very different spot, Pollieve is not a particularly popular politician. The singular reason they will win in a land slide is that people HATE Trudeau in a way I haven't seen in my life.
The liberals really should take a long hard look at themselves and re-evaluate. On a more local level the Ontario Liberals actually just collapsed a while ago and haven't even been relevant in politics ever since.
This isn't just the normal trend.
> they will win in a land slide is that people HATE Trudeau in a way I haven't seen in my life.
Harper was widely hated.
What does "prorogued" do here? Does it prevent a no-confidence vote? And, what would a no-confidence vote do?
It means it is suspended.
(slightly off topic: I have no idea why tf my comment got down-voted. I'm not even expressing any personal opinions about Trudeau or politics. I'm just answering the question as factually as I can from the point of view of a Canadian who is observing what is going on.. I have data and sources for everything I said .. including how low Trudeau's approval rating is as well as the polling... the only thing I wasn't sure of is how his rating compares to that of previous PMs. Thing is, I even know people who have voted Liberal their entire lives, and plan to in the upcoming election regardless of who the leader is, and even they can't shut up about how much they despise him. So regardless of your partisan affiliation, I don't think I even said anything that most Canadians would find the least bit controversial).
Prorogued means parliament will not meet, and so cannot hold any votes. Right now it is purely being used to prevent such a vote since there is a majority in parliament that would now vote against the government in such a situation, which in turn provokes an election.
During his delusional ramblings (and that is no exaggeration) Trudeau said that the GG was persuaded to prorogue to the 25th March because of the no confidence vote held back in December which he survived because the NDP supported him. The NDP no longer will support the Trudeau gov (announced in writing about 10 days after the last vote), coincidentally just as their leader qualifies for a nice parliamentary pension scheme.
The whole thing is a horrible exercise in the worst stereotypes of champagne socialism.
Tying NDP support to their leader's pension is silly/lazy.
As part of their deal with the Liberals, the NDP had some real power to implement legislation. If an election happened tomorrow the NDP would lose that power.
Unhitching from Trudeau at this moment is a good move for the NDP, they want to distance themselves from Trudeau's unpopularity before the next election. That Trudeau is now leaving benefits them even more, they could conceivably continue to support the government now that it's missing its most unpopular member, or they could pull the plug right away if they think they can steal away some Liberal votes during a snap election
> Tying NDP support to their leader's pension is silly/lazy.
It really isn't - the alternative is it's the most unbelievable happy coincidence.
You have to wonder how blatant the personal moneygrabbing by Lib and NDP leaders has to be before their respective support bases actually accept what is going on in their faces. Those leaders see the parties purely as a way to secure power to use to gain personal wealth at the expense of the populous.
> the alternative is it's the most unbelievable happy coincidence
It's not though.The NDP were faced with two choices:
1) Support the Liberals and get some of their policies pushed through 2) Support the Conservatives wish to call an early election in which the Conservative are sure to win a majority leaving the NDP powerless
The reason why the NDP choose this moment to pull their support is that it's an election year, so there's little chance any more NDP policy would be passed. One person's pension (a relatively wealthy person at that) is just a fun partisan talking point for Conservatives.
[dead]
>I hadn't heard that this was likely to happen. Any Canadians here able to weigh on whether this was expected or is a normal procedure for your elected officials?
For many months liberal backbenchers have been calling for him to resign. Though obviously not 'likely to happen'
Only weeks ago(mid december) Trudeau refused his own caucus' call to resign. Saying he was staying on to fight for Canadians. Freeland quit with a flaming public letter and he still said he's staying in the game.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/liberals-renew-calls-trudea...
Didnt really do much, it took weeks more before he finally resigned yesterday. Despite this, still no resignation. Now parliament has been mostly suspended due to the liberal's failure to submit documents. A significant scandal.
The reason his caucus is upset is because the vast majority of them will lose in the next election. Polling suggesting they hold onto ~20 seats in an Ignatief level of fail. Resignation will still be quite unlikely. From a strategic point of view, taking the L election night and then letting a new liberal leader rebuild their reputation over 4 years is the right move.
You'll now have a leadership race where nobody wants the career ending job. The rats that try to fight for it just want their name as prime minister.
Yet here he finally resigned. Change Control dictates it was the gun ban.
The polls post-gun ban put the liberals in single digit seats. It was over for him. The gun ban ended Trudeau.
Yeah, he pretty much had no choice. Most of his party had given him the ultimatum. This has happened a bunch of times outside of the Trudeau Harper Chrétien eras, it’s normal.
We changed the URL from https://www.bbc.com/news/live/clyjmy7vl64t. Interested readers might want to look at both.
Can you please add this to your pinned top comment? This was incredibly hard to find as a comment, and a BBC bearing is actually pretty important to this topic.
Ok, done.
Cheers!
A friend of mine recently finished his engineering PhD at the University of Toronto. He received employment offers from an American firm and a Canadian firm. The Canadian firm offered a total compensation package worth 80,000 CAD (~55,000 USD); the American firm offered him nearly 275,000 USD.
Correlates well with the Univ.Waterloo System Design Engineering Class of 2023 Profile - https://nguyen-kha.github.io/SYDE_2023_Class_Profile_Officia...
Relevant slides are #97 and #101.
Percentage of class with Full time positions outside of Canada: 71.5%
Median Total compensation for US positions is about double the Median Total compensation for Canadian positions.
You could argue similar for US/UK, but I would still rather live in the UK.
This was my experience too, scaled back in time to when I graduated in 2010 from UBC.
For reference, Harper was PM in 2010.
I have a friend who did something similar about 15 years ago. They are moving back to Canada this year.
I can’t believe Justin Trudeau would lowball your friend like that.
People usually blame the country’s leader for any and all economic issues, whether fairly or not.
We do, broadly, have a problem in Canada with people blaming the federal govt for things that are not under its jurisdiction. We have a very federal system, and the provinces have a lot of power.
But in this case, yes, I think federal policy is directly implicated.
In this case, it's definitely Trudeau's administration fault by flooding the Canadian job market with immigrants, which lowers job compensation and increasing housing cost.
low salaries in canada existed long before trudeau and will exist long after.
They've always been lower, but it was always 20%ish lower. Now it's like 50%.
And in the meantime, housing prices have gone up exponentially. Housing in greater Toronto is more expensive than the Bay Area, but the compensation is far far lower.
I'm not one to blame Trudeau personally, or even immigration per se. I think there's a multitude of factors. But it's best not to deny the situation, which is that in the last few years there's been... problems... in the Canadian SWE labour market.
Lump of labor fallacy. The pie is not fixed.
fallacy fallacy. The pie is not fixed, but does not necessarily grow >1:1 when people are added.
Right it grows larger.
not necessarily, thats my point.
It's not the quantity / size of pie. It's the fact that the Canadian labour market has explicit "escape valves" for "skilled labour is too expensive" built in as a policy plank in the form of the LMIA and TFW process.
They are tools that "industry" lobbied for expansion of, and got. Have persisted through both Conservative and Liberal governments for decades, but was expanded markedly under both Harper and (especially) Trudeau.
ROLF
Rolling on laughing floor
They are indeed some of the best floors to roll on.
I hate the F Trudeau crowd almost as much as I hate Trudeau, but
Low compensation ranges here are in fact in part the fault of fed gov't policy. Industry freaked out about "labour shortage" and the government responded.
The database of LMIA (Labour Market Impact Assessment) applications is public. You can see for yourself how many thousands of software engineering jobs were filled this way. (Including by big "elite" tech companies like Apple, Google, Amazon, etc.) This was deliberate policy to bring in foreign talent from India, China, etc. in order to fill a "shortage" of us, which well, that shortage was less about "can't find someone" as "I can't find someone cheap enough."
In this case I don't actually blame Trudeau or the libs -- they're on the whole too stupid about our sector to understand that in fact these low compensation ranges harm our industry more than they help. I blame corporate interests who have the ear of the gov't and misled them into thinking that somehow this would make Canada "competitive" in information tech.
All it does is force good talent to leave the country, and encourage sweat shops to open up offering mediocre "IT" services.
We're subsidizing our own Canadian students to go through great schools like U Waterloo, etc. and then losing most of them the moment they graduate, as they go to the US on a TN1. And in exchange...
I've been in this industry long enough (25 years) to have seen things go up and down relative to the US a few times. This is the worst it's ever been. Especially because you can no longer make the argument that "I may get paid less but it costs less to live here" -- that ship sailed 10 years ago.
[flagged]
Is there only one engineering firm in Canada ?
I guess you’re trying to say there is no money there because of Trudeau ?
Best of luck to our Canadian friends.
[flagged]
It has since been heavily upvoted. The thing to do in such cases (i.e. when you notice an unfairly downvoted comment) is give it a corrective upvote and move on.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
[flagged]
> makes it sound like you think my vote is the correct one that will right the previous wrong the bozo downvoter.
Well yes, except for the definite article. Any upvote counteracts any downvote. If a downvote was bad then an upvote can be corrective by neutralizing its badness. I thought that was obvious, so it's interesting that you don't.
> people who somehow hate Canadians or who find the concept amusing
There's also a boring explanation for some otherwise weird downvotes: misclicks.
It's a low effort comment that doesn't add anything of value.
Good will is of value.
PG covered this point way back at the start of HN: Empty comments can be ok if they're positive. There's nothing wrong with submitting a comment saying just "Thanks." What we especially discourage are comments that are empty and negative—comments that are mere name-calling.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newswelcome.html
I mean, yes, it doesn't say much.
But it is perhaps nice to read a simple sentiment, wishing well.
I wasn't posting for upvotes, just expressing a feeling.
I applaud you for taking time to acknowledge the basic humanity of the situation.
Calling that low value is unfortunately on-brand for this crowd.
[flagged]
I appreciate that this is a popular sentiment in certain media/online circles (i.e. Bluesky) but I don't believe it is at all an accurate statement from a policy standpoint, nor a rhetorical one.
What makes you think that? They don’t seem very similar to me aside from sharing the broad label of ‘conservative’.
To try to expand on this in a constructive way, I think the similarities are that they both pretend to be outsiders while being very connected and powerful and have a worrying amount of disrespectful and vindictive rhetoric and a refusal to engage with the media/intentionally egging on of rage towards the media. That's kind of where it ends though, since I don't think Poilievre has Trump's trademark complete lack of self awareness (I'm not trying to be insulting here, I think it gets him pretty far honestly and has lead to some of his funnier tweets, though I'm not a fan.).
Poilievre seems more like a traditional politician trying to ride the populist right wing train, and he's far less charismatic than Trump. Conservatives I know aren't crazy about him, if he weren't up against the even more unpopular Trudeau during the post covid global incumbent purge going on I don't think the election would be nearly as favorable. I am worried, but mostly due to the general state of the world.
Also Canada gets most of its media from the states, so right wing Canadians talk like right wing Americans with most of the same talking points. I think they'll always look similar and I can't necessarily blame Poilievre for that even if it does annoy me and he definitely intentionally rides it. It's certainly not going to end with him, and the Libs also like to pretend to be Democrats when it suits them.
And love of simplistic slogans. Whether there's more substance to Pierre Poilievre than to Donald Trump remains to be seen.
Simplistic slogans win popular elections. So, prudent strategy at least.
Because Liberals pretend that anyone they don't like is a mini-Trump to try to scare people into voting Liberal.
We should have been given the choice to properly send him off in a general election.
We kind of did, twice, and he failed to get the message.
It has been, in the past customary for leaders of parties that fail to win a majority (after being in a minority) mandate to resign. That Trudeau a) called the last election at all and b) failed to resign after getting the same result as when they entered into it... is frustrating.
It certainly created an appearance of weakness that I suspect fed into the situation with the convoy.
Also probably tactically stupid, because he got to hold the blame for all the post-COVID problems.
That link says he's going to stay on as PM? In the video he says he "intends to resign."
Canada has a parliamentary system where the leader of the party with the most votes becomes prime Minister. So Trudeau can step down as leader of his party while remaining Prime Minister.
In this case he intends to stay on until his party selects a new Prime Minister
Technically the leader of the party with most seats gets first shot at forming government. If it is a minority parliament, another party could get a shot at forming government if the first place one fails.
One comment does not negate the other. It is traditional in most jobs to give notice before resigning. In government, it typically is the same unless for resignations. Being forcefully removed is closer to being fired/sacked with termination being much more suddenly
And even when they're forcibly removed (e.g. via a vote of no-confidence), they often keep on doing the job until a replacement is found, albeit with limited scope/powers. See France for instance recently.
He is going to stay until a new leader is chosen by the Liberal Party of Canada.
Why not hand over power immediately to the next person in line? Doesn't preclude the party choosing someone else when they get around to it.
There is no formal “next in line”. The closest potential successor would have been the deputy prime minister; Chrystia Freeland held that role until a few weeks ago when she dramatically resigned and sparked this chain of events.
Currently, this is “Working as Intended” in Canada’s political system.
Usually what happens when a party is not in power is that the leader will resign and an interim leader will be appointed until a new leader is elected through a leadership election. When a party is in power however, that interim leader would be an "interim Prime Minister" and is avoided because it's a lot of responsibility to give to an interim with no mandate from voters or the party.
There is no such thing as a "vice-PM" in Canada. There is no "next person in line", and parties choose leaders more or less independently of the election cycle, according to the party's needs.
So what happens if the PM has a heart attack and drops dead? There’s no defined succession?
The Governor General appoints a caretaker government with (ostensibly) limited powers until the party in power or the leading coalition select the next PM and create a new government.
Absolutely not. Just like every developed country, there is a continuity plan in case of issues. The deputy leader of the party in power is supposedly that person. That the Governor General then appoints that person Prime Minister is an implementation detail.
It's just that in Canada, that continuity plan is reserved for unfortunate deaths. When a PM wants to resign, they basically do what Trudeau did; they announce their party will do a leadership race while they stay on as PM.
The nuance here is that the Governor General by convention follows the advice of the PM, who establishes their continuity plan at the start of their government (IIRC it’s a standard party document and they just update the names).
It’d cause a crisis with the monarchy but they’re not legally bound to appoint the deputy. Like you said it only applies to special circumstances, I was just addressing the legal mechanism by which it happens (as the OP talked about a PM dropping dead).
In the Westminster system, being bound by tradition and being bound by law (written law that is) both have the same legal weight. Our courts can render decision on the necessity of following tradition.
[dead]
I never voted for Justin Trudeau and don't like him, but despite all the angry rhetoric right now in the long term I think he will be considered by history to be one of the better Canadian PMs.
Amongst the Canadian PMs I've experienced, Chretien, Martin, Harper, Trudeau made the most impactful and positive policy changes (eg. legal cannabis, childcare) while navigating the country through the challenges of covid and Trump NAFTA renegotiations.
The negatives of his term are recent and largely tied to global issues being faced by many countries right now (eg. inflation) and so I expect future historians to hand wave these away.
My rough impression is that immigration and housing policy contributed significantly to his low approval ratings. Trudeau enacted a rather large increase in immigration a few years ago, and this caused a rather large increase in housing and food costs, with understandable economic repercussions, and changed Canadian attitudes over that time due to the related economic stress...
For ref: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJHm03osbHc
FYI, the "large" increase in immigration was driven by the provinces, Ontario's conservative government in particular. The provinces control the number of seats in colleges and Doug's government froze domestic tuition rates, pushing colleges to turn to international students. Now, the province also approved almost every request for international students.
The Feds can't step in sad say "no". The immigration problem is largely on the provinces. The Federal immigration numbers have grown much more slowly.
The Feds also lifted the caps for international students to work full-time hours off-campus ("temporarily" but repeatedly extended), among other things.
https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/ne...
In what way is immigration not definitionally a federal problem? If you're referring to programs like OINP, note that
> The OINP recognizes and nominates people for permanent residence who have the skills and experience the Ontario economy needs, and the Government of Canada makes the final decision to approve applications for permanent residence.
(https://www.ontario.ca/page/ontario-immigrant-nominee-progra...)
Also record low unemployment. 4.9% in 2022 set records. For comparison Canada’s average unemployment rate is 7.5% over the last 50 years.
https://www.cicnews.com/2022/07/canadas-unemployment-rate-dr...
The irony is that it was industry (especially small business) freaking out about that low unemployment rate and the pressure it was putting on wages that led to the bulk of Trudeau's demise.
They went crazy with the TFW program, LMIA, and immigration generally in order to reduce inflation. But this is not the kind of inflation that ordinary Canadians think of when we think of inflation -- grocery prices, etc. It's the inflation that business leaders freak out about: wage inflation.
And so the gov't acted, and increased the supply of skilled and unskilled labour, and here we are.
It's amusingly also the same inflation that led to Trudeau Sr. getting in a pile of trouble in the late 70s, too. In that case instead of immigration they tried the ill-fated "wage and price controls" legislation... which was... not popular.
It's almost as if raising the minimum wage is reflected as wage inflation when you're already in a condition where a large fraction of workers are near the wage floor. Adding labour supply isn't going to do anything about that unless it's biased towards higher skill.
(But honestly, I'd say a lot of these businesses deserve to fail if they can't afford to pay minimum wage workers.)
This was the cause of the panic, though. In the 2021/2022 time-frame many businesses that would normally only pay the minimum wage, give irregular hours, and treat people pretty woefully were forced to pay well above minimum wage. There was quite a bit of public anxiety from businesses about labour shortage and the result.
Please look at these numbers in depth - not how they're presenting them.
Similarly, the majority of industry growth has been Federal jobs - from Grok:
"Since Trudeau took office in 2015, the size of the federal public service has grown by approximately 43%. By March 31, 2024, the federal government's payroll included 367,772 employees, up from 257,034 in 2015."
43% increase; paid for by the public.
A 43% increase in federal jobs sounds big until you realize it’s ~110,000 positions over 9 years. For this to be the ‘majority of industry growth,’ Canada would need to have added just ~200,000 jobs in total since 2015. That’s laughably off—Canada typically adds hundreds of thousands of jobs annually. For context, Canada’s employment grew by ~2.7M jobs between 2015[1] and the end of 2024[2]. Federal job growth is a drop in that bucket, not the bucket itself.
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/437730/employment-in-can... [2] https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/241206/dq241...
A 43% increase and the state of affairs in Canada is far worse now, including that he doubled Canada's debt to over $1.2 trillion - so now our interest payments are also huge, far less money every day going to social services because it's instead just paying interest on the debt.
Came during the pandemic like every other country and still doesn’t compare to past debt level when compared to GDP which is how you compare debt.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_public_debt#/media/Fi...
There is absolutely no way he will be looked at as one of the better Canadian PMs..
By all accounts he will be looked at as one of the worst considering the position Canada was in at the start and end of his government.
Inflation, unemployment, housing, homelessness, healthcare, crime, national unity, the overall economy. .. Just all of these things are significantly worse than 2015.
With that being said I do think cannabis + child care were both wins... but like at what cost.
Also feels like with cannabis all of society was already trending there seemed like a very easy win.
Then with childcare it is a win but it is also complicated as many daycares have unenrolled from the program because it doesn't cover enough of the cost.
Half of those issues are provincial.
Canadian politics is the Spiderman meme with local, provincial and federal governments all pointing their fingers at each other.
If healthcare in your province sucks blame your Premier.
It's more complicated than that. Technically healthcare is a provincial responsibility in the constitution but the feds bought their way into healthcare and regulate it through the Canada Health Act. The Feds cannot legally compel provinces to comply with the CHA but if they don't comply with it, they won't receive the federal health transfers which would essentially bankrupt the province. The province would still be getting taxed at the high federal rates, but without getting it back, to the tune of ~12% of total Provincial revenues.
Coming at it from a separate angle, it would be quite a coincidence if it just so happened that every single province in the country, over decades, has had their healthcare systems failing in basically the same way with the same problems for end users, despite having totally different geographies, economies, even languages, run by all kinds of different provincial parties across the extremes of the political spectrum. The parsimonious explanation is that there's a systematic issue in Canadian Healthcare as it's defined or operates across the country.
> The parsimonious explanation is that there's a systematic issue in Canadian Healthcare as it's defined or operates across the country.
There is! It’s because healthcare is expensive and 20th century social democracy is out of fashion. Your premier can increase expenditures by improving healthcare infrastructure, or simply kick the can down the road for the next government to deal with. Many voters don’t like taxes or debt, so the latter is an easier sell.
Occasionally, the premier can roll a 20 on persuasion and suggest that it’s the Prime Minister’s problem too.
Now, the Prime Minister could look to changing the CHA and increasing services/taxes, but it’s probably too much of a can of worms to attempt to fix in our current political climate.
"Coming at it from a separate angle, it would be quite a coincidence if it just so happened that every single province in the country, over decades, has had their healthcare systems failing in basically the same way with the same problems for end users"
It isn't though. These problems that are now being hard-felt in Toronto and Vancouver have plagued the Atlantic provinces for decades.
Unemployment during his term besides covid was at record lows and still below the historic average of 7.5%.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/808294/unemployment-rate...
Two things.
The link you posted doesn't agree with statcan's website
https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/daily-quotidien/241206/dq241...
Second it's hard to compare unemployment rates to 10 years ago with the rise of the gig economy. "Employment" ain't what it used to be
He increased size of Federal government by 43% since 2015 - from Grok: "By March 31, 2024, the federal government's payroll included 367,772 employees, up from 257,034 in 2015."
That's 110,738 new people on pay roll - but not that are actually productive for the economy, they are counted but are not the same as free market jobs - they're actually the opposite and a negative to the economy.
This also doesn't account for the economic harm and suffocation to local Canadians already here struggling to find work, much of the work instead going to the millions of temporary foreign workers and those on student visas.
You’re conflating separate issues here—federal employment growth, economic productivity, and temporary foreign workers (TFWs)—in an attempt to overwhelm the conversation.
First off, the claim of ‘millions of TFWs’ is pure hyperbole. TFWs currently make up around 4.1% of the workforce [1], or roughly 1.1M workers—not ‘millions.’ Ironically, if TFWs are such a large share of the workforce, the federal job increase (~110,000) seems even less significant by comparison.
And it’s odd that Grok is used to cite federal employment numbers, but you conveniently ignore its data on TFWs or international students, who are key contributors to Canada’s economy. Cherry-picking data like this only distracts from the real issues.
[1] https://www.statcan.gc.ca/o1/en/plus/7457-temporary-foreign-...
I referenced TFW + student visas.
Otherwise you missed my points of the economic harm of TFWs displacing Canadians already here looking for work but won't accept work
The same "debate" is going on passionately in the US in regards to the H-1B program.
Otherwise I'll avoid engaging further with you since you "cherrypicked" what you read of mine, and then you try to subtly demonize/put me down by claiming "in an attempt to overwhelm the conversation."
[flagged]
I knew roughly what the numbers should be, and Grok had the correct answer.
Does your comment add anything to the conversation?
Is Canada better today then when he started as PM? I struggle to agree that it is. Housing is as bad as it has ever been and the immigration decisions seem to have been so careless that even people that would agree with immigration as a general principal are horrified by it by and large. The Canadian dollar has collapsed VS the USD.
I guess it always ends bad if you stick around long enough.
Depends on who you're talking to.
There are many indigenous communities that now have water that are better off than before he was PM.
Speaking for myself I think things in 2019 were better than 2015. The pandemic and things after the pandemic (hi inflation and spiking interest rates) have not been quite so fun but these are global issues and people around the world have had a similar experience. Arguably there is more Trudeau could have done but some things are beyond his reach (eg. Bank of Canada sets interest rates).
If you're a person without an established home you own you probably feel things are disastrously worse than 2015 when you presumed that surely eventually you'd own one. If you already own a home you probably care quite a bit less.
Housing was deeply dysfunctionally broken in the major cities well before Trudeau became PM in 2015 and the lazy status quo approach of his government ensured that the contagion of housing shortage would spread Canada wide. It's mostly Provincial and Municipal governments that are at fault but plenty of fault for the feds too. Despite the fact that Fed housing policy right now is better than it's ever been the damage has been done.
The problem is that massive spike in immigration under J.T. is making the housing issue worse.
That's the rhetoric but I'm not sure it's the reality. At least not where I live. It's a big country so ymmv. In a neighbourhood with a scam college bringing in lots of students yeah sure maybe some distortions of the market were more noticeable as rental vacancy plunged and rents increased.
In Vancouver housing prices were already going into their exponential curve in 2014 before this government was even elected or immigration numbers were fiddled with. In the last two years while immigration was increased home prices have been flat. You can have a look at BC Assessment as home values are updated every year. The biggest change comes with 2021 due to ultra low interest rates. As interest rates rose home prices stagnated as expected.
Personally I don't see any connection at all between home prices and immigration though I can imagine rental vacancy and rent prices were impacted in some places (particularly smaller town Ontario) due to the reluctance of municpalities and the province to build more homes and the prevalence of exploitative scam colleges).
> The Canadian dollar has collapsed VS the USD.
The CAD is sitting at about $0.70 USD right now, which isn't really outside of it's typical range, and not really unexpected given the difference in interest rate now between Canadian & US interest rates. If you look at historical prices it looks more like business-as-usual, the CAD usually bounces between 0.70-0.80 USD.
CAD was actually on parity with USD between 2007-2012.
Yes, but that was a very unusual time and can be attributed to the US financial crisis. In addition to money fleeing the US, the Canadian and US interest rates diverged to strengthen the Canadian dollar.
That's actually bad for the economy. Canadian companies benefit from the lower dollar as goods are often sold in USD, but wages are paid in CAD. 0.75 to 0.8 is the historical benchmark for the exchange rate.
> The Canadian dollar has collapsed VS the USD
This might be splitting hairs, but I think this is more about the strength of USD than the weakness of CAD. I don't know that you can say CAD has "collapsed" when every other major currency has seen a similar (or worse) drop compared to USD over the last 10 years.
It always is this. Same reason the CAD was at parity during the financial crisis.
After 2008 we also "benefited" from very high oil prices which drove the dollar higher
That high dollar didn't do any positive things for Ontario & Quebec's export oriented manufacturing sector though, which is why I put "benefited" in quotes.
Canada is definitely worse than it was ten years ago, but all of the major problems are provincial responsibilities: housing, health care, education, policing.
The largely conservative provinces have done a very good job of blaming Trudeau and immigration for problems that are entirely their own.
The problem with Trudeau's government is he didn't/doesn't consult with provinces very much. They continue to announce programs and initiatives that live in the territory of the provinces without provincial buy in.
If it was one or two provinces you would be correct, but when every province is facing the same issue(s), then the turd starts to stick to the feds... The immigration issue is a prime example, he announced higher than normal targets but didn't consult or work with the provinces about this, which caused many provinces to be taken by surprise and have their social systems overwhelmed by the influx of people. Many of these same systems where still recovering from covid... so yea recipe for disaster.
It seems like every other week I hear a news article about a joint announcement between BC & the federal government having to do with housing or health care. It takes 2 to co-operate.
Go listen to the statements the PMs made after their all provinces meetings. A lot of it is "back off from our turf".
Previous govts had a minister who's only job was managing provincial-federal relations and making sure the feds and libs moved in sync
Out of curiosity, how is the housing & health care situation in those conservative provinces compared to other provinces (like Quebec, where I live in)?
It's instructive to compare Vancouver to Toronto. 10 years ago in BC health care was in worse shape and housing was ~2X the cost of Toronto. In the past 10 years BC has had an NDP government and Ontario a Conservative one. Both housing & health care have gotten worse in BC, but at a much lower rate than in Ontario. Today health care in BC is in much better shape than Ontario, and the cost of housing in Vancouver is about the same as it is in Toronto.
Are there any numbers/data for the quality of healthcare in the provinces over time?
At least for housing I see the average home prices in each category (condos, townhomes, detached) still higher in Vancouver than Toronto (when googling a bit, I found https://wowa.ca/reports/canada-housing-market with some data. But there's probably lots of real estate related sites with more).
> Are there any numbers/data for the quality of healthcare in the provinces over time?
Good question. Let me know if you find some. My assertion is anecdotal, I have FOAF doctors who have moved to BC.
I moved from a liberal province to a conservative province last year. My cost of living is 25% lower, gas is much cheaper and I was able to buy a new beautiful house which was an impossibility in my previous province.
What province to what province? This is an incredibly shallow observation without more information.
Living in QC, I'm scared about the future of medical care and infrastructure. I wonder too what's the situations for other provinces.
Quebec has been led by the Conservative CAQ party since 2018.
Immigration? The massive amount of temp foreign students?
Housing, healthcare and policing being provincial responsibility is an oversimplification. Provinces are basically compelled to comply with the federal Canada Health Act under threat of being taxed for, but not receiving the huge Canada Health Transfers which account for ~12% of provincial revenues. Housing on the supply side is largely provincial, but the feds could still take a larger role. They have had a long time to think of ways to bring in more skilled labour in the construction industry rather than, say, the fast food industry. And let alone thinking ways to solve the housing crisis, the Liberals wouldn't even admit until a few months ago that the price of housing is too high and should go down.
The feds run the RCMP, they set most criminal laws and sentencing, bail policy etc. As Poilievre repeats ad naseum, the same 40 repeat offenders are arrested thousands of times in Vancouver. It doesn't matter how good a job the police do if the justice system refuses to punish them.
I don't know what are the problems we're facing in education but I don't think that is on the top of the list of why Canadians are feeling frustrated with the Liberals.
> The largely conservative provinces have done a very good job of blaming Trudeau and immigration for problems that are entirely their own.
No. Immigration reduces available housing. Immigration overloads the health care system. Immigration strains the education system. Immigration creates ethnic enclaves that are hard to police.
Immigration is a federal responsibility. Trudeau and the Liberals are to blame.
Does immigration make these things worse? Yes. But it's only a very small part of the problem. You can't blame the entire problem on a minor cause.
Here's a very good 55 point plan to fix housing: https://www.ontario.ca/page/housing-affordability-task-force...
BC implemented far more of those points than Ontario has, and succeeded in changing Vancouver's housing costs from ~2X Toronto's to 1X Toronto's.
And P.S. the immigration surge was mostly in student visa's, driven by Colleges under provincial jurisdiction.
> Is Canada better today then when he started as PM?
As you've already concluded, the answer is absolutely not. The Canada I grew up with, and mind you my family are immigrants from the 90s and early 2000s ourselves, is completely shattered.
>The Canada I grew up with [...] is completely shattered.
What happened?
One could endlessly go on about the economy/COL, immigration, crumbling healthcare, housing crisis, far-left ideology going mainstream, etc.
But I could frame it much simpler than that - Canada, at least in cities of modest sizes and up, is rapidly transitioning from a high-trust to a low-trust society.
An anecdote: my sister is more than 10 years younger than me, she's currently attending the same university as I did over a decade ago; in the span of less than half a year, she's got 2 bikes stolen - her original bike with front wheel removed to bypass the lock in late summer 2024, then the entire lock cut to steal her replacement bike in December; this would be inconceivable to me during my time living in the same town.
Such an odd anecdote given that it wasn't that long ago Igor Kenk was the king of bike theft in Toronto.
> One could endlessly go on...
Yet, apparently one will instead sidestep the discussion entirely. Frankly the more you've tried to answer the question the less you actually answer it...
I don't see how "rapidly transitioning from a high-trust to a low-trust society" or "she's got 2 bikes stolen ... this would be inconceivable to me during my time living in the same town" reflect failures in Canadian government at all, really.
Has societal trust actually increased anywhere in the developed world? Sure, our governments have had their share of failures, but it would actually take an extraordinary vision and effort to increase societal trust as technology and population advance.
Is it possible your sister had a shockingly unlucky semester? Or that your world model was simply naive and wrong 10 years ago? Hard to say since the anecdote isn't really evidence of anything.
Every store in my town now locks up anything small that costs more than $20 in cages. Talking to some people working there it was pretty common for people to walk in, take a bunch of shit, and walk out. Drivers are completely out of control. I've witnessed at least 3 people run red lights in the last 2 years, while I can remember only one such incident in the 10 years before that. Signalling is no longer something drivers do - like at all. For the last 2 years teenagers have terrorized the local park on Canada Day shooting fireworks at random passers by. With someone setting off fireworks under an occupied baby carriage last year. Car thefts in Toronto got so bad that people were building retractable bollards in their driveways[1].
I could go on, but there's a clear apparent trajectory to these experiences.
[1] https://toronto.ctvnews.ca/a-thief-will-think-twice-some-tor...
Still mostly anecdotal, but a better answer, and probably belongs higher up in the thread actually.
>Still mostly anecdotal
In principle, what sort of hard evidence is gathered that could establish the point?
I'm kind of confused by the question. Do you think an unverified commenter on a public website saying "all the stores in my town [not named] do X [but I didn't count]" is a type of hard evidence that I'm arbitrarily rejecting?
No; I think that there's no feasible way that anyone could have hard evidence one way or another for the underlying question, and that you should therefore take anecdotes more seriously.
>Has societal trust actually increased anywhere in the developed world? Sure, our governments have had their share of failures, but it would actually take an extraordinary vision and effort to increase societal trust as technology and population advance.
Japan. Again, depending on where in the country, but things like muggings and drunk driving have drastically decreased in the last 35 years.
Technology isn’t the issue
Mass immigration and increasing wealth disparity are much more relevant.
If you know you know, and clearly plenty of people who read my original comment do.
Judging from your other comments, you're either wilfully ignorant or actively dishonest, can't tell which, and frankly don't care either way. All I know is it'd be a complete waste of time to try to convince you.
> If you know you know
And if you don't, you... don't deserve to know?
> you're either wilfully ignorant or actively dishonest
I think "willful ignorance" is a good description of accepting impossible-to-verify anecdotes of internet comments as evidence of societal change, personally. But I'm realizing we don't have the same goals in the conversation so I understand why it feels pointless to continue.
Look at Japan as a homogenous and extremely (if not the most) high trust society.
>Look at Japan as a homogenous and extremely (if not the most) high trust society.
Why does Japan need separate trains for women, and why can the shutter sound on Japanese phones not be turned off?
All countries need this; Japan's just the only one that did something about it. I'm sure NYC ladies would love segregated cars right about now.
Um... why exactly am I looking for a highly homogenous society?
I'm just saying they tend to be more high trust, which is supported by statistical data.
Ah yes, increasing theft is just a fact of the "developed" world, and simultaneously, anyone that claims theft has increased is just imagining things.
> Ah yes, increasing theft is just a fact of the "developed" world
It seems like a pretty likely outcome of high population growth!
> anyone that claims theft has increased is just imagining things
Anyone that claims an anecdote is data is just bullshitting, actually.
anecdote is actually data tho lol
> economy, healthcare costs, housing crisis, and... far left ideology
One of these things is not like the others. Could you elaborate on how 'far left ideology' relates to the others in terms of the supposed fall of our country?
Whenever I see people using the term "far left", I realize its meaning has been subverted and neutered to mean something else entirely. Same with "woke". It's very Orwellian to see how successfully these words have been distorted to obscure their nature and power.
I think people are talking past each other. Some of these parties are "far left" on social issues while simultaneously being "moderate right" on economic issues. So you can label these parties either way, depending on what's convenient to your argument.
Maybe he means the extreme levels of immigration that have tossed fuel on the housing and healthcare crisis?
For context, the liberal party is right of centre these days. We don't even have a "far-left" party. The NDP is solidly left, probably slightly left of what the liberals were years ago when this poster thinks things were wonderful.
We do have fringe parties that are far-left, that basically get a handful of votes a year, and we have one far-right party, the People Party of Canada, that gets enough votes to occasionally get some news coverage.
I think any Canadian that identifies as “far left” would find your post hysterical. They don’t even have a party to vote for anymore - best they can do is a begrudging vote for the NDP. This country has been on a rightward shift for decades. e.g. look at the hard push towards privatization of government services in Ontario.
[flagged]
This anecdote could be explained by something as simple as her forgetting to lock her bike consistently, locking it incorrectly, using poor locks, etc.
The 90s were a demographic golden age for Canada but people get old. This is a problem true of most of the western world and is upstream from almost any other issue.
Housing has gotten worse in many places.
I hate to be repeat a meme but land value tax would fix this.
Only the provinces have the constitutional authority to impose a land value tax. (The cities get their property taxing rights from the province).
Ding ding ding!
Yes! I find it interesting that the Federal government is getting the majority of the blame for these issues when in reality I feel like provinces should be at fault.
Not to say that the federal government is without blame, but I feel like given the current state of healthcare in many provinces, as well as the housing s** show, provincial governments should be primarily held at fault.
Zoning/housing, Healthcare, education... Obviously the immigration loop holes have been an issue as well, but these three are provincial.
Seems odd though that despite these issues being provincial that every province is seemingly struggling with these issues...
Almost like there is a larger macroeconomic force at play.
I don't see how it's odd at all. The kinds of changes that would stabilize housing and make growth more sustainable would threaten the interests of many wealthy people, including politicians themselves.
Sorry I really should've added /s
I agree with you.
> larger macroeconomic force
Ding ding ding!
Demographics my friend. Somehow what should have been the most predictable thing ever (that people get old over time, changing the age profile of the country), has somehow created issues that are coming as a complete surprise to the government... Healthcare underfunded because people are getting old. Tertiary education overattended leading to a skills mismatch. A large cohort of baby boomers who consistently push for NIMBY style policies because they spent so much on their house that their retirement depends on it...
Policies should be proactive in these fields rather than reactive. I'm of the opinion that many countries /regions struggling with these issues have largely done it to themselves by lack of foresight.
I'm hopeful that it will improve in the future though. Pretty much only able to go up from here! Let's go land value tax!!!
Sure, but no province would take the political risk without an assurance of it happening simultaneously in other provinces.
https://x.com/jayvas/status/1779557729629073660/photo/1
That's the problem with J.T., our economic growth has been vastly Government employees.. our private sector is dying..
Canada is in approximately the same unfortunate position of being a supplicant state of the US. This was apparent as far back as 2018 or so. The US "Commerce Department" recommended sanctions on Canada for a trade violation in timber. The worst case sanctions add about $9,000 to the cost of a new single family home in the US.
"March 2016, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and U.S. President Obama instructed their respective cabinet members responsible for international trade to explore all options for resolving the trade dispute.[32] Canada's international trade minister, Chrystia Freeland, said that "what we have committed to is to make significant, meaningful progress towards a deal—to have the structure, the key elements there a 100 days from now"."
Then:
"April 24, 2017, U.S. Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross said his agency will impose new anti-subsidy tariffs averaging 20 percent on Canadian softwood lumber imports, a move that escalates a long-running trade dispute between the two countries...
"On April 25, 2017, the Trump administration announced plans to impose duties of up to 24% on most Canadian lumber, charging that lumber companies are subsidized by the government..."
Then:
"On August 19, 2024, the US raised tariff rates on imports of Canadian softwood lumber products from 8.05% to 14.54%".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canada%E2%80%93United_States_s...
If anything, tariffs are proof of independence, not of functioning as a "supplicant state".
Can you name a similarly wealthy country that is actually better today than it was on the date he started as a PM?
I can't. Seems like something else has been going on. Potentially you could name Ireland, by becoming a tax haven, screwing over everyone else instead.
Since 2015? Easy: Norway, Poland, Greece, Netherlands, Ireland, Singapore, USA probably.
But I do anecdotally agree with your point as a whole: it feels like there has been a slowing or potentially reversal of progress. Perhaps to be expected given the pandemic though.
Easy? You've lived in each of those places for more than a year around 2015 and around now? Physically impossible.
My second homebase is in one of the countries you named. I can tell you that not even 10% of the population would agree with you. Across the political spectrum. No idea that you're basing it on. Crumbling infrastructure, housing worse than Canada, ever increasing problems with immigration.
The US I could potentially agree with, it is the outlier, though debatable.
Ireland I talked about.
Norway is laughable to bring up, sorry. Might as well bring up Saudi Arabia.
If you'd been to Poland and Greece you'd know they're nowhere near "similarly wealthy" countries wrt Canada, entirely different tier. This reveals you haven't really spent time there.
Singapore is a city-state. I'm sure we can find a city in Canada that's doing better. And from what I know, Singaporeans too are majority unhappy with their country compared to 2015, so not sure what you're basing it on.
America is, especially since 2021 but nobody wants to believe it.
Depends who you are, I guess. If you’re a young person who is not financially stable enough to form a family because of high housing prices, then you would disagree. If you’re a relatively well-off person with assets like real estate and equities, then you’re quite happy. It’s all a matter of perspective.
I myself am doing quite well financially, but I am still quite unhappy with the current situation because of the devastating effects of inflation and increased housing costs specifically, have had on younger generations (despite the fact that it financially benefits me personally)
Take that problem in the states an multiply it by 3x in Canada.
Lower Income, High Prices, Less Options.
I'm in a similar position that I'm personally doing okay but almost everyone I grew up with has had to either leave Canada for the US, had to live with their parents into their 30s or more to very remote / rural areas to afford life.
Have you ever tried talking to the people who don't believe it, and showing them what their own lives were like in 2021?
Are you successful this way?
Have you considered the possibility that the metrics we use to decide whether "countries are better off" don't match the values of their citizens?
If nobody believes it, then is it actually true?
Well, that is the ultimate philosophical rabbit hole.
If everyone is doing better objectively but have been hammered with propaganda so much that they subjectively believe they're doing worse, how do you square that?
I'd argue there's an easy solution in getting rid of the propagandists that are making everyone sad, so twitter, facebook etc.
Agreed, it’s a rabbit hole, so nobody is right. I’m just on the camp of — if people feel that they’re worse off than before, then telling them how “they have to feel better because of objective facts” won’t cut it.
Wrong date. He was PM 2015.
Not sure why the parent comment is being downvoted. By most sources, the States has been the exception and not the rule post-pandemic.
* https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/why-...
* https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-us-recovery-from-covi...
Because even HN, by nature, is still an incredibly US-centric place. And has historically been a very capital-focused place where the stock market and GDP are taken as the only serious indicators by which to measure whether a country is doing well. Both of these points have very slowly been changing here, but the downvotes show it's still largely the same.
I spend my time between East-Asia and Europe, with one foot firmly in each of them, giving me a different perspective showing that Canada is the norm, not the outlier, which would be the US if there were to be one.
I still didn't expect it though, I thought here people would realize authoritarians aren't being voted in everywhere because the populace think things have been improving.
A big reason driving the collapse of the Canadian dollar is the incumbent government's climate change policy. Since being elected to power, the government has regulated, stalled and effectively defunded the fossil fuel industry, accounting for approx. 22-30% of Canada's GDP. That loss of revenue is felt in the dollar exchange.
This is not true in the slightest. Beyond the fact that the government went so far as to buy a pipeline to ensure added capacity for Alberta oil sands development, they've been enormously supportive of LNG development in BC, approving many projects and recently going so far as to give a $500M loan toward a project.
https://www.ipolitics.ca/news/crown-corp-loans-500-million-f...
Please stop spreading lies and FUD. The pipeline buyout was too little too late after the government stalled and delayed permits over never-ending environmental assessments. All in all, the projected cost of capital flight exceeds $30 billion CAD (the article is from 2019):
https://financialpost.com/commodities/energy/the-30-billion-...
The government has openly committed to ending all funding for fossil fuels in 2024:
https://www.iisd.org/articles/insight/ending-canada-support-...
> the courts stalled and delayed permits over never-ending environmental assessments.
FTFY.
> the courts enforced legislation enacted by the Liberal government.
There you go, the truth will set you free.
The legislation almost completely predates the current government. Much of it comes from the Harper government who had to rework environmental legislation because the courts forced them too.
Isn't it off-topic? Or am I missing the relevance here?
If people can't understand why this is happening, understand that Trudeau has been in power for 9 years and basically everything is worse than when he started. And if you want to say, "Blah blah it's happening in other countries", don't bother. We're becoming poorer when compared to all our peer countries.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-gdp-per-capita-rich-...
https://economics.td.com/ca-productivity-bad-to-worse
https://financialpost.com/opinion/justin-trudeau-legacy-coul...
Is Canada a better place today?
Here come the conservatives, again. Canada might not be a two-party system, but you'd never guess looking at the last hundred years.
> Canada might not be a two-party system
I prefer the term: two-party state
Let's not refer to Canada as a state for the next 4 years
Problem with First Past the Post voting systems, we tend to vote "strategically", and since the Alliance and PC's joined early augh's, the Right has been "unified" while the left is still split between the more centrist liberals and left NDP, with a small portion bled off for green's.
Would love to see explanations of downvotes since this is factually true...
First past the post is awesome.
I moved from a proportional-representation country to a FPTP one (Canada) and it's so much better to have a specific individual who is my MP.
Back where I was born, there's a grey and anonymous party list of people selected by extremely dubious internal party political means. I never felt the slightest bit represented; and the political process was completely opaque.
Now I have a dude with a newsletter, an email address, and an office.
I moved from a PR country to a FPTP one (Canada) and my experience is exactly the opposite - as a left-leaning individual in a conservative ward, there's no way for my vote to ever count. But yeah, now my interests are directly ignored by a dude with a newsletter, an email address, and an office.
The idea is that you would now engage with your dude and your fellow citizens in that conservative riding and be a moderating influence.
You are all in the same boat in a sense that’s more local and less abstract than with proportional rep.
Considering its a safe conservative riding, that engagement is ignored and goes no where. Politicians here are the same as anywhere else, they will focus on where the money and the votes come from and ignore the rest.
Which is why voting needs to be effective, and FPTP is exactly why there are so many "safe" ridings for the various parties.
Why would they engage with you? If they are safe, there's zero need for them to give you the time of day. How do you propose moderating someone who can tell you to fuck off with impunity?
You can have both. Selected the candidate and proportional presentation. Most popular party candidates get elected.
Multiple proportional systems don't require lists and provide the best outcome.
Comparing FPTP to a worse system and decided FTPT is awesome while ignoring its known and widely discussed flaws surprises me. Its not really open for debate these days although people love to reject reality.
> Its not really open for debate these days although people love to reject reality.
Whenever I see something is not open for debate, I view it with a lot more skepticism. Almost always, this type of framing, to make an idea untouchable, leads to abuse. We saw this in a lot of the “trust authorities” type messaging in the pandemic.
One of the outcomes of the 2015 election was that we had an electoral reform committee that evaluated various electoral systems to see what best fixed Canada's problems. 88% of the experts that spoke to committee said that Proportional Representation was the best system for a country like Canada.
Maybe this issue is technically open for debate, but the enormously strong consensus from experts in the field weighs to one side of the issue.
Gravity's existence isn't open for debate, that doesn't mean there isn't more to learn about it.
The studied and understood outcomes of FPTP systems in the real world have all shown similar issues trending towards 2 party systems, being susceptible to vote splitting on one side of the spectrum and leading to 'strategic' instead of 'idealistic' voting.
There are worse systems by far, and better systems. Ignoring the bad because you can think of a single worse system is ignoring reality.
> Gravity's existence isn't open for debate
What? Of course it is! There are physicists looking for the unified theory who hypothesize that there may be a unified way of understanding all the forces. IANA physicist by any stretch so maybe I've misunderstood the Great Courses and books I've read, but gravity is actually quite poorly understood to us currently.
But the broader point about things not being open for debate is dangerous, and I think you unintentionally demonstrated a real-life reason why. If we stop questioning gravity and trying to understand it's cause better (which IMHO primiarly happens through reasoned, intelligent debate) then we stagnate, and stagnation can be dangerous as from there it's a short hop and a skip to regression.
If you want to make the argument though that some things aren't open for debate, I think there are stronger cases, like the Cartesian "I think therefore I am" is hard (though not impossible) to argue against because it forces the thinker to make arguments for their own non-existence, which is a tall order for a person who by definition must exist in order to do so.
Gravity isn't understood, but it exists as a force regardless. We know it does, no one debates it does, but whatever we _call_ it might change, and how we understand it will inevitably change.
That was my point. Gravity as a force exists, but the understanding of that force is still being developed. We might even change the name, but there is no doubt the force exists.
I should have worded it better. Extrapolating from that is probably not achieving much.
Ah fair, I do see your point on a difference between existence and understanding. Though, some of the theories I've heard basically posit that gravity doesn't really "exist" in any sense that we have of it now, but is rather just an exposed slice of some higher dimensional reality that we can't experience entirely. But, to your point, something obviously exists there because it's measurable, repeatable, etc, so from that perspective nobody is questioning it's existence.
Also what came to mind was picturing Einstein doing his thought experiment where he was in an elevator at various levels of acceleration, and his observation that there was no way to tell the difference between the force felt from gravity vs. the acceleration. That to me feels a lot like quesitoning the "existence" of gravity! But I don't think we're really disagreeing, more were just operating with different definitions in mind of "existence."
Appreciate the discussion!
“Someone disagrees with me” = “they’re rejecting reality”
Do you realize how alienating this shit is to a centrist?
I am a centrist. There have been a ton of studies on various sides of the spectrum highlighting issues with FPTP as a system.
Its not they disagree with _me_, they disagree with the overall state of political science and its years of research into the outcomes of systems, not just what people "want"
> I moved from a proportional-representation country to a FPTP one (Canada) and it's so much better to have a specific individual who is my MP.
You're mixing things up. FPTP isn't what gives you "a dude with a newsletter, an email address, and an office" and prop-representation doesn't prohibit having one either.
FPTP has many many flaws, one being that it trends towards a defacto 2-party system due to strategic voting, especially if only one spectrum is divided (i.e. liberal/ndp, or alliance/progressive conservatives back a few decades ago).
The Anonymous Party list, and opaque process are not inherent factors on any of the replacements for FPTP, in fact the only one WITH the list was supposed to be an open list, and that was the system with the least political support.
Ranked/alternate voting, STV and other options directly address the issues with FPTP without introducing the drawbacks of MMP/unelected leaders being selected for seats.
Ranked/alternate voting and STV shouldn't be lumped into the same bucket.
Ranked voting is a majoritarian variant of FPTP that doesn't fix many of the flaws of FPTP. There is still the flaw of "favourite betrayal" that induces a need to vote "strategically".
Single Transferable Vote involves ranking candidates but is a Proportional System.
Alterate ranked voting somewhat addresses the idea of needing to strategically vote (favorite betrayal) in favour of your ideal candidate, but only to a degree depending on the parties and initial polling support (a runaway party you don't like will still lead to strategically voting for the party most likely to beat them). Its proportional in that the winners have to get at the most amount of votes across the ranks after eliminations, i.e. you can't win if no one picks you as second/third option, so you have to be picked by someone therefore you are considered to be representing them.
STV does a much better job of it and is why I was strongly in support of STV over AR/MMP or other options.
What’s wrong with two parties?
Countries with multiple small parties frequently seem to collapse into political torpor where nothing ever changes.
Countries with two parties often collapse into inaction where nothing ever changes too.
There is no way 2 parties can represent the diversity of opinions and ideas in the country.
2 parties means power tends to jump back and forth due to the recent ruling party doing badly vs the opposition actually providing an alternative and compelling change. This means parties tend to "lose" more than actually "win" elections.
2 dominant parties when one side of the spectrum is split among 2-3 parties tends to allow a smaller minority to achieve stronger governments which is not representative. I.E the split on the right in the 90's allowed the Liberals to have many successive majority governments despite less than 50% of support for many of those elections. In the aughts the alliance and PC merger turned that around and now the NDP and Liberals tend to split the left to a degree and the right can win a strong majority with 35-38% of the actual vote. This doesn't benefit any side long term.
"getting things done" isn't always the best metric for a political party, especially when they don't have the public support for their changes.
STV or various other methods that allow proportional results while maintaining current representation and government size were the best outcome, but didn't benefit the liberals so they dropped it.
Totally agree, 'dude with a newsletter and an email address' is very underrated.
In practice the entire government has been propped up by a leftist coalition between the Liberals and NDPs, in recent years, so functionally I think they have done just fine.
In fact, in a first-past-the-post system with a minority government you often end up giving disproportionate power to the third place party, in terms of the popular vote (in this case the NDP) because they hold up the government and can make significant demands in doing so. This has been absolutely borne out in Canada.
We did it to ourselves. Modern "small L" liberalism went completely overboard, and we're seeing that play out now in the rise of fascist leaning governments in the west. It will take a generation for the pendulum to swing back.
I hope Canada gets some strong leader now that Trudeau is out!
This video is why Canada is different from the USA. The prime minister and other politicians will interact with comedians.
see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Ns7EsDVNwA&t=262s for a view that every Canadian knew was coming since last summer.
This is good news. His government has been dysfunctional for some time now. It's unfortunate that he held on for so long, as we needed a government ready to deal with Trump yesterday.
>been dysfunctional for some time now
It was always dysfunctional. It's just that it wasn't noticed early on.
So it's all going down now eh? For those not on the pulse of CdnPoli, this is a primer I wrote a few weeks ago but is still widely relevant:
What we've been watching for the last 18 months has been the slow collapse of the governing Liberal Party, led by Justin Trudeau (LPC) - Polling and projections have been turning heavily against the LPC since last summer (2023), and the internal party cracks started showing after a by-election (special election, to fill an empty seat) loss in Toronto this summer and then one in Montreal not long after. Both Toronto and Montreal are considered the LPC's "heartland" and losses there suggest that the polls are correct in predicting a huge defeat for the LPC in a general election. A few Members of Parliament (MPs) began pressuring Trudeau to step down as party leader (and therefore Prime Minister (PM)) and some announced that they would not run again. At time of writing, a third by-election has just been lost by the Liberals.
The next Canadian general election must be held no later than October 2025. That is because the last election was in late 2021. That 2021 election led to a "minority government" in which the Liberal Party won the most individual seats (districts, ridings, constituencies, etc.) but not more than half of them. As a Westminster Parliament with plurality voting (First Past the Post, winner-takes-all) coalitions are not common in Canada, and the minority government usually operates on a vote-by-vote basis with other parties, while allowing their party to form the government. Some votes, notably ones about the budget, are called "confidence votes" and if one fails, the government has "lost the confidence of the House of Commons" and must either call an election or allow opposition parties to try to gain the confidence of the house and form a new government.
Minority governments do not usually last the full length before another general election must be called by law. This one has lasted longer than average because the LPC signed an agreement with a smaller party called the NDP. The NDP demanded some new welfare policies such as subsidized dental care and some medications and in return would support the LPC in confidence votes. The NDP's leader, Jagmeet Singh, announced this fall that he was ending the agreement with the LPC and would only support the government on a case-by-case basis. This is likely to save some of his party's own polling numbers, as they have also faltered (the junior party in coalitions or similar situations almost always fall more than the senior party, worldwide) but do result in the NDP looking weak as they heavily criticize the LPC government yet vote to keep it governing the country. The NDP do not want an election right now for several reasons: their own polling numbers are not good, they can squeeze more out of a minority LPC than the Conservatives who are strong favourites to win the next election (we'll get to them, don't worry), the party machine is short on money (they recently spent a lot of their funds on a close provincial election in British Columbia) and possibly because Singh wants to ensure himself and a few of his MPs have been elected long enough to meet the minimum requirement for a government pension. This last point has been heavily debated and used in Conservative attack ads, so make of it what you will.
So, what are Canadians unhappy about? The biggest item is cost of living - most things boil down to how much it costs for a roof over your head and food in your fridge. Housing costs have been astronomical in Vancouver and Toronto for decades, but have been rapidly increasing across the country. Another is immigration - like many countries, Canada's population is aging and there has long been a cross-partisan consensus that immigration is a great way to counter this. But since the pandemic the LPC increased immigration levels massively, especially in 2 sectors: student visas which were being taken advantage of by "diploma mill" shoddy private colleges that promised immigrants a pathway to residence, and low-skill temporary foreign workers (TFWs) who are employed in fast food or other entry-level positions. Not only has this put much more strain on the housing supply in major urban areas like Toronto or Vancouver, but it also brings down wages and facilitates abuse of these unfortunate people who just want to build a better life for themselves and their family. The LPC has also faced a lot of scandals. Every government is corrupt and has scandals, but there have been a lot from this government: from SNC-Lavalin and WE Charity earlier, to ArriveCAN and a cabinet minster lying about indigenous heritage to win government contracts more recently. As in the US, opioids have been devastating to Canadians, with tent encampments and overdose deaths no longer limited to just Vancouver's infamous Downtown Eastside. Police departments complain that the justice system is not responding well to repeat offenders either due to bail reforms or bleeding-heart judges. Finally there's the anti-incumbent bias we've seen in elections worldwide throughout 2024 and the Canadian trend of voting out a government after around a decade in power.
So let's get into who are likely to come next - the Conservative Party of Canada (CPC), led by Pierre Polievre since 2022. The CPC was last in power under Stephen Harper from 2006-2015 and has a lot of support in the western provinces of Canada, plus competes with the LPC and NDP in the suburbs of major cities. Polievre is a pugilistic career politician who has very successfully channelled the anger Canadians are feeling into a commanding polling lead. Polievre has been called a populist because he has levied much more criticism of the LPC government than policy suggestions, and for his schtick of reducing issues into "verb the noun" such as "axe the [carbon] tax", "build the homes" and "end the crime." But listening to his earlier speeches in Parliament suggest that Polievre is much more of a policy "wonk" than his current campaigning suggests.
When Parliament returns in March with a new Liberal Party leader (and Prime Minister), it is almost certain to be defeated immediately and an election will be called.
> When Parliament returns in March with a new Liberal Party leader
Trudeau will ask for, and likely get, a prorogation to give them time to choose a new leader. Add the 51 days for the election and it's likely to be a fall election.
He's already got prorogation, and that's why I said March and not end of this month.
> Trudeau said Gov. Gen. Mary Simon granted the request to prorogue Parliament until March 24.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/prorogue-parliament-canada-...
After the end of March, no budget or supply has passed the HoC, hence that date.
Is it just me or is the quality of politicians on a downward spiral? Between retirement-age out-of-touch boomers, clueless good-looking male liberals and corrupt authoritarian plutocrats, it sure feels like there's a shortage of honest hard-working people in leadership positions.
I mean it is kinda obvious that the system in western democracies is structurally flawed such that there's a selection bias for crooks and incompetent assholes (lobbying, i.e. legalized bribery), but still, how come the bad guys always seem to win? Or is this just a symptom of a deeper malady of modern society?
I'm not saying nothing's changed, but there was a lot of dirt on previous politicians that didn't get surfaced and pored over in the 20th century, as it has been in the 21st. The saying about not wanting to know how sausages or legislation gets made, is a pretty old one.
Not just you. And to answer your question, I don't think it's politicians but the entire way that society disagrees and discusses important topics.
I've been working on a side project over the holidays related to this, but nothing to share yet unfortunately. Suffice to say, I would love it if we could frame discussions around specific policy issues, and focus on listening to one another and prioritizing and agreeing on problems as a first step before jumping straight into political rhetoric and speaking only to one's own base or those who already agree with you.
Also somewhat related - the history of decline of political discourse is staggering. Apparently in the US, Abraham Lincoln used to debate by having 90 minutes of uninterrupted complex analysis. This has been replaced by modern debate formats like those popularized by the Jubilee YouTube channel which optimize for 10 second clips.
Interestingly, there is a counter movement where long-form interviews are becoming popular again among niche crowds who actually want to hear and discuss issues. Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, Lex Friedman, Sam Harris, Destiny to name a few. I don't think we've seen the end of the changes for these discussion mediums. Hopefully we'll see changes for the better!
>I've been working on a side project over the holidays related to this, but nothing to share yet unfortunately.
What kind of project?
>Interestingly, there is a counter movement where long-form interviews are becoming popular again among niche crowds who actually want to hear and discuss issues
Indeed. Personally, I wish we could have that kind of content, but edited to remove the filler (redundancy, time spent reasoning out a position) while still accurately representing nuanced views and the evidence for them.
I don't think so. I think that the archetype of what a politician should look like has broadened from a hypermasculine silver fox rich-grandpa type with a mid-Atlantic accent. Bill Clinton was the last one.
I have migrated from Canada to the USA and my metrics for wealth, ease of mind, actually working while at work, outgoingness, etc instantly improved. I don't plan on ever going back. I feel chagrin at seeing Canada fail. I'm glad to see Justin Trudeau pressured out, I know there won't be meaningful change associated with the decision, but I have hope.
I'm a Canadian living in the US as well. I definitely make more and am able to save more here. I have better job opportunities and also more interesting work. Where I am the weather is also much better. If money wasn't an issue I'd move back to Canada in an instant (but maybe my view of Canada is outdated, been away for > 10 years). Why?
- Lower wealth inequality
- Safer, with lower crime rates, especially violent crime
- Higher life expectancy
I lived in the US for around ten years after college and moved back early during COVID. I'd always wanted to go back, and had the possibility of keeping my American salary and working remotely; it seemed like a no-brainer, given how unstable things were feeling in the US at the time.
FWIW, my view of Canada has dimmed considerably. The two things that I felt really set us apart when I left and over those ten years were (and these are intertwined) the stronger Canadian social safety net and the sense that, in general, Canadian culture was kinder, more progressive, smarter, and less racist. But the last few years have really put that to the test. Meanwhile, in my time in the US, I really started to appreciate the aspects of American culture that are lacking up here.
It's been kind of heartbreaking. I was seriously thinking of exploring going back to the US permanently. And then last November happened, and it's too unpalatable at this juncture, once again.
While Canadian wealth inequality is still not as bad as the US, it has gotten significantly worse in recent years as a housing crisis has created a deep split between haves and have-nots. Personally, I think this more than anything else is responsible for the backlash against Trudeau, especially among young people who otherwise would typically be left-leaning.
I will state the opposite and say that my quality of life has dramatically improved after moving from the US to Canada.
It is much more accessible, much easier to get about, far less hostile and any loss in wealth is offset by actually being able to enjoy my time more.
can i ask what you do?
Computer graphics software engineer.
Also a Canadian living in the US.
The US is good to anyone who can pay. And my career made it such that I earn a lot more in the US that I would in Canada, so the US has been good to me. It's unclear how widespread that experience actually is. There's a lot of statistics that this is one of the best times to be alive (despite our very cynical / negative attitude about it).
But personally, I have no intent of going back, if only because of the weather.
The USA is great when you're working age and are healthy. Outside the 18-65 age range, not so much. I hope Canada will not morph into USA-lite.
Or if you have older family members you care about. Or if you don't want your children having to practice 'active shooter' drills during their school days.
My toddler had active shooter drills in day care.....I sometimes think about leaving US.
We have that in canada. And non-drill stabbings at my kindergarteners school
> We have that in canada
That's certainly not the norm. Where, more specifically?
Metro Vancouver
Many of my friends are also thinking of just leaving to Europe. This whole thing about running after more and more money may just not be worth it at the end.
Nowhere is perfect, but I see many places in the EU as a great lifestyle arbitrage. If someone made or can continue to make US level money while living in the EU, that's a great situation. Depending on the country, visas can be challenging, but most HN skillsets will qualify for digital nomad visas.
We bought a place 2 years ago and are in the process of fixing up (it was used as a vacation home).
> make US level money while living in the EU, that's a great situation
Have you considered Canada?
No, it's too cold. Also, as my wife and I get closer to retirement we want to do more traveling in and around the EU.
I am happy for you. May I ask which country?
Sure, we landed on the northeast Italian coast. We seriously considered Greece, southern France, and Croatia.
I don't think there is a single right place for everyone. Each person needs to do their own checklist of requirements.
My grandparents emigrated from the US to Canada in the late 80s when they were in their 60s. One of their daughters had married a Canadian decades before and she sponsored them. They loved it. They felt like they got better care up there.
I think 26-45 might be the more realistic ideal range. Even then, if you have chronic health problems, godspeed.
There's certainly more wealth available if you have the means to get it though.
The meme goes that in Canada if you have an expensive healthcare need the government will offer euthanasia. Is that not true? How come euthanasia is now the fourth leading cause of death in Canada?
You shouldn't be putting so much stock in memes.
According to Google it's 4.7% of deaths in 2024 in Canada. This story says it's the fifth leading cause of death: https://www.ncbcenter.org/messages-from-presidents/maidcanad...
Is it because people outside of 18 and 65 don't have to pay rent or a mortgage? Also one of the often touted benefits of Canada to US is the public healthcare system, but after 65 most people are on Medicare which is adequate and under 25 generally under your parents insurance.
Genuinely curious whats better under Canadian system for the young and old.
> Genuinely curious whats better under Canadian system for the young and old.
The young, old, and those too unhealthy to work full-time. And to answer your question: a better social safety net, IMO.
Edit: Because this topic is flamebait, I'm preemptively declaring that I'm not going to argue about my opinion. YMMV.
There is no social safety net. Half my town burned down in a national park, including my own home. You think the Federal government did anything? You think there was any net at all?
The Federal government even had the gall to refuse my 2 year old's passport renewal for example because I only paid the renewal fee, and not an additional fee for the passport getting destroyed before expiration date that was buried under 10 pages of fine print that I missed because we were homeless with a toddler. And they already had my CC# on the application anyway, but because I didn't explicitly mark down the extra fee, the application was refused.
Now we've found a new home in a new town at our own expense, and we can't see a doctor. My 2 year old can't see a doctor. There's not enough doctors and practices won't take on new patients unless you go on a years-long wait list. This is our "free" healthcare. If you're dying, you can go to an emergency room and wait for 8 hours to see a doctor. If you need anything routine you're fucked if you don't have a family doctor. We had one, but our town burnt down and now it'll be years before we have one again.
You know how we access healthcare? We go to Europe. We go to my wife's country of origin twice a year to visit family and get healthcare. I had a surgery there (wait in Canada was 2 years, in the EU I got it done in 2 days), our son has had all his checkups and most of his vaccines done there.
This social safety net is a myth, a theory. It exists until you actually try to access it.
edit - the only help we received was our insurance company, a private corporation. So what's the difference versus the US apart from our much higher taxes and lower wages?
Your first problem is best solved by writing to your MP. Your Conservative MP.
Your second problem is the responsibility of your provincial government. Your Conservative provincial government.
Did you miss the part about it being a Federal park?
I've never really thought we had something resembling a safety net, just a variety of social services that are theoretically available, but only to varying degrees and mostly not in rural areas, which seems to be one of the defining schisms of the last century whether it's suburban -> normal urban or rural -> urban.
On one hand, I guess your tragic situation is exactly what I'd expect private home insurance to cover, aside from burglary and other natural disasters, but on the other it's becoming an annual occurrence anywhere west of Calgary, and like many other tragedies, massive holes are being exposed in the artificially scarce and super inflated stock of available housing in any given area; living in a town in a national park is somewhat exceptional on every front, but having literally no backup plan if a whole town disappears is revealing of comically inept levels of government. I know some Lytton residents! are also basically camping, waiting on help from the province that may never come.
That is to say, some parts of our social service systems and economy work—or at least aren't horribly broken—if and only if nothing unexpected happens or we don't grow or shrink population wise or culturally at all. There's basically no margin.
One could say things would be better with more money, but that's just a matter of degree, it's not like GDP going up would automatically prevent displacement or create more doctors, it would just give individuals a bit more leverage potentially when something bad happens. We desperately require better feedback loops tied into the bedrock of our society, better incentives.
The problem isn't the non-existence of a social safety net per se, the problem is our taxation rate is as high as countries with a functional social safety net, but we don't actually receive those services.
Both the US and European models are valid IMO. But in Canada we get the worst of both.
I don't really understand how the U.S is supposed to work, but I agree with the problem.
Family doctor and ER are not your only two options - you can go to a walk-in clinic. Some of them even take appointments.
I know this is true in Alberta (I assume you lived in Jasper?)
There's far fewer walk-in clinics today than 20 years ago. And a total of zero in the town I relocated to.
As someone who is going to be 65 in a couple years and is researching Medicare options... it seems like a bit of a mess. The drug plans have been separated out so you have to buy those separately. If you get an "advantage" plan then you've got the same old "in-network" "out of network" BS to deal with and they can and do deny coverage. If you get plain old Medicare (probably what I'll opt for) you can theoretically see any doctor (but there are some that don't take Medicare) but you still have to buy a "Medigap" plan. Looking at the costs for my wife and I being on Medicare is still going to be something like $700/month so don't think that when you get to Medicare age that you won't have to pay any insurance premiums anymore. We're currently paying about $400/month for a silver plan and dental through the ACA so our premiums will actually go up under Medicare.
[flagged]
What was your path of immigration into the US as a Canadian?
Any tips or advice?
If you're posting on Hacker News, you probably have a skill set that'll allow you to get a job covered by a TN.
You go to border control, tell them you're applying for a TN, hand them a copy of your identification, resume, credentials, and offer letter. Then you wait for a couple of hours while they process you, and you're set for the next few years. Rinse and repeat until your job sponsors you for an H1-B or you marry an American citizen and can apply for a Green Card.
Of course, there's other ways - talk to an immigration lawyer - but that's the simplest.
You can apply for a Green Card directly from TN status, although timing has been an issue recently.
Not a lawyer, but isn't that kind of dicey? The TN is non-immigration and temporary - it's not supposed to be used if you have any intention of permanently migrating. I'd worry about it putting your TN status in jeopardy.
H1-B is non-immigrant and temporary. L1 is non-immigrant and temporary.
Going from TN to an immigrant visa via AOS is only risky in the sense that:
- After you've filed your i485 you will no longer be able to get TN status, this applies regardless of your non-immigrant status.
- You can't travel abroad between filing the i485 and receiving AP, which could be 6+ months.
On the plus side you get a Green Card and don't have to play the H1-B lottery.
H1-B and L-1 are both dual intent [0]. TN isn't.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_intent
True but that doesn't really impact your ability to apply for a Green Card from TN. You have to wait 91 days [0] since your last entry before making an adjustment of status application.
[0] https://www.boundless.com/immigration-resources/90-day-rule-...
Every year thousands of people in statuses like F-1, O-1 and TN get employment based green cards. The idea that you have to be in H-1B or L-1 status to get an employment GC is simply 100% false.
+1 idk why I people keep saying that TN and H1B are the same. They are fundamentally different visas
Nobody is saying that. They are in the same category of non-immigrant visas.
They are categorically not, see the above comment on dual intent.
You can get a TN visa cancelled for expressing desire to stay permanently
> They are categorically not, see the above comment on dual intent.
They are.
https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/us-visas/visa-inf...
> You can get a TN visa cancelled for expressing desire to stay permanently
That is not true provided you follow the 90 day rule.
In the conversation of moving to the US for work 90% of visas are going to be non immigrant so saying all non immigrant visas are equivalent is needlessly obtuse.
An H1b allows the person to enter the country with the intention of getting a GC and can do so without having to leave the country.
A TN visa is re issued every single time you cross the border and can be denied by a border guard on any amount of misrepresentation
Secondly, your advice about the 90 day rule without context is both bad advice and can get someone's visa cancelled and stuck out of the country.
For future readers. Don't take this advice, ask a lawyer and if you intend to get a GC don't go on a TN unless you want legal complexity.
Pro tip - its about to change so either move fast under current regs or wait.
I got a TN while working for big tech, met my wife, got married, and got a married based GC. The GC took 2 years.
I feel like this site has a bit of a bias when it comes to the USA. Most devs are highly compensated in the USA and can afford whatever.
Being poor or sick sucks here.
Most of Canada is pretty poor now.
From the Economist: https://archive.is/UdixF/ec46ebf7fe812cd5e9432f45f68bd142e6c...
Their housing is more expensive than the US, but taxes are higher and wages are lower.
If Canada’s provinces were states, the populated ones would be poorer than the poorest US states, along with higher taxes and expensive housing.
https://brilliantmaps.com/us-vs-canada-gdp-per-capita/
British Columbia is now poorer than Idaho, again, while being much more expensive. Ontario and Quebec and Canada as a whole are now poorer than West Virginia.
You say "now" as though it's ever not been the case. These comparisons do a poor job of taking into account cost-of-living and quality-of-life; it's simply not the case that you're better off in Montgomery than Toronto.
The median wages for Toronto and Montgomery are actually quite similar:
Toronto: $84k CAD ($58k USD)
Montgomery: $55k
The person living in Montgomery can easily afford a house and a middle-class life. Can the person in Toronto?
Would I rather live in Toronto personally? Yes. But on a median salary, no way.
https://www.city-data.com/income/income-Montgomery-Alabama.h...
https://www.toronto.ca/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/9877-City-...
> The person living in Montgomery can easily afford a house and a middle-class life. Can the person in Toronto?
Of course not. But a person living in New York City - making the much higher median household income of 75K USD - also can't afford a house or a middle-class life there. And yet across almost every metric New York is considered a better place to live with higher quality of life than Alabama.
> also can't afford a house or a middle-class life there.
So can you compare cost of living between NYC and Toronto and does the difference in median account for COL difference ?
Would be interesting to hear some first hand experiences from people who lived in both or similarly comparable US/Canadian cities. I was under the impression that Chinese investment in Canadian real estate really destroyed the housign market. I feel like the growing popularity of investing in residential real estate is a global phenomena but some markets are more exposed to some effects than others so it's possible to get some intuition on what impacts it.
Yeah, you're probably - in most regards, depending on various things - better off living in NYC than Toronto (having lived in both). But that's at least a conversation worth having, a comparison worth making. Comparing Canada to the poorest places in America like the person I was replying to was solely on the basis of average wealth only makes sense if you've never been within spitting distance of either.
I have lived in both. It's easier to afford a Canadian home, despite their price, especially in Montreal but even in Toronto, compared to NYC or SF, for the median person. The median household income in NYC is ~80k, vs ~95k in Toronto.
Canada is much much more geographicly concentrated than the US.
Toronto is definitely cheaper than NYC. However Toronto represents a WAYYYY higher percentage of Canadians than NY does.
Rough numbers.
GTA population ~7 million
NYC population ~8.5 million
By representation GTA represents 10x the amount of the country that NYC does.
Major cities being unaffordable in Canada pretty much means Canada is unaffordable.
The same case is not true in the US
If you're going to use the GTA @ 7M (6.2 according to wikipedia[0]) you should perhaps use Metro NYC @ 23.5M[1]
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toronto
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_New_York_City
That's a fair correction, but it is still approx 3x the proportion of the population.
Edit: actually I take that back the metropolitan NY area seems to encompass a much larger area than the GTA and goes across multiple states.
Sure, but on the other hand that's just as true for income in the US, the disparity in average income between major cities and the rest of the US is even sharper than it is in Canada.
The social services are better in Canada though. The big downside is the lack of quickly available treatment for serious-but-not-life-threatening illness.
> The big downside is the lack of quickly available treatment for serious-but-not-life-threatening illness.
Which often happens in the US as well. I recall having to wait 3 months to get in to see a gastroenterologist about 10 years ago. People living in rural areas of the US often face this so it's not like it's a problem exclusive to Canada or other countries with universal healthcare.
It doesn’t help if you can’t afford a house. If you just look at a simple crude statistic like gdp per capital US is 83% higher. You can’t make stuff appear out of thin air, there’s less resources to go around and people are objectively worse off
It actually does help, in fact it helps MORE if you cant afford a house, or are homeless, to have a strong social net. Not arguing that the US isn't richer or can offer more financial resources to its citizens.
[flagged]
> Being poor or sick sucks here.
Can't say for the rest of Canada, but the healthcare is deplorable in Québec.
Don't worry it gets worse if you come to Ontario.
There is not and never has been any place on Earth where being poor and sick doesn't suck.
There are many places where it sucks much, much less.
I'll take Iceland or another Nordic social democracy for evidence that you're wrong there.
But at least in the US, if you can afford the treatment, you can get it.
But at least in first world countries, unlike the US, you WILL get treatment. Even if you are poor, like 95% of the US population.
No that's the thing, you can't get the treatment if it doesn't exist.
For the years that i was living in Ontario there were only 3 MRI machines across the entire province. The waiting period for that diagnostic MRI ranged from anywhere between 10 and 24 months. If doctors were even convinced you were worth getting it.
You could die from something before you could even end up getting properly diagnosed with it.
You might not have competent enough doctors in some countries for specialist treatment if you need it. A popular Canadian Youtuber who lives in Japan (which generally has great medical care) decided to relocate to the United States during the time they were undergoing their particular cancer treatment a couple of years ago. Japanese yakuza bosses pretty famously obtained their illegal organ transplants at UCLA Medical instead of in Japan...
The US's system is certainly flawed but it guarantees that you can obtain the best care possible if you can afford it. That's much better than not being able to get the care even if you can afford it.
> For the years that i was living in Ontario there were only 3 MRI machines across the entire province.
Jesus. I've got more MRI machines than that within walking distance of my house.
It does seem to have improved significantly, as in 2020 Ontario had 124 (which made it the best provisioned province at the time). When were you there?
https://www.statista.com/statistics/821422/number-of-mri-uni...
Early 2000s. When I left in 2003 there were 5 and then they had a few years where they added 20-25 per year.
CT scans were bad too. Everyone I knew just drove to New York to get diagnostic scan and dental work done at the time.
But even then: Ontario has 15 million people and 124 machines? NYC has 8 million residents and 470 machines.
Do those machines operate 24/7? I'm Canadian and get regular (publicly funded) MRIs as part of my healthcare needs and they always happen on time, and close to home. Zero issues. Sometimes you get appointments at weird hours but that's because they run them constantly.
We could definitely use more and our healthcare system could definitely use serious improvements, but the way it's talked about amongst Americans often seems a little divorced from reality.
Is that not two different tradeoffs? One is first come first serve and the other is purely if you have the resources at the time? The only people I see that praise the "guarantee if you can afford it", are indeed, the ones that can afford it.
Soviet bread lines were first come first serve too and I don't know any former Soviet state residents gushing about how great those times were. Those 3 MRI machines that I mentioned had to service 1/3 of the population of Canada at the time -- about 10 million people.
Saying "oh that's just first come first serve" is totally missing the fact that the service level can be woefully inadequate.
What's really crazy is that I live in a small city of about 100k people and there are about a dozen hospitals that I can choose from, first-class trauma centers, multiple renowned research centers (affiliated with three different universities). None of that is counting all of the urgent care and other facilities in the area. I have an order of magnitude more options for treatment than I did when living in New York City...
The only way I could open myself up to more/better care options would be to move to Texas.
Well the US spends 17% of GDP on health care and Canada only spends 12% while life expectancy in the US is at least 2 years less.
You get superb care for the rich and mediocre care for the average guy and very little for the rest.
Life expectancy is, perhaps counterintuitively, not highly connected to health care. The major factors contributing to the gap between US and Canadian life expectancy are car accidents, homicides, and cardiovascular disease, and CVD differs wildly depending where you are in the country; there are states that lead the G7 in CVD outcomes, and others (like Mississippi and Alabama) that look like developing-world countries.
None of this is to defend the US system in particular, which wildly overspends on the outcomes it achieves. But generally, when it comes to managing chronic and acute health conditions, those outcomes are very good.
If only there was a way to change and influence the use of public funds...
Possibly it does have that bias (which is to be expected considering its origins and target audience), but I've generally found a good faith and generous reception to pro-EU arguments (in counter to pro-USA comments) here as well.
What you say is true. But do you have insight on how badly the Canadian poor have it relative to the American poor?
Should've done it weeks ago. Utterly shameless.
I'm out of the loop. What happened weeks ago to spur this?
The linked article isn't particularly helpful.
Reckless spending commitments that were challenged by the Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland. Favourite to take over I might add.
He ordered the finance minister to walk the metaphorical plank and she did not acquiesce
Well, he's not had the best holiday season, lots of turmoil in his cabinet and parliament has been completely stalled.
Since early 2023, Trudeau has been having a rough time - https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/sophie-gregoire-trudeau...
Are you kidding? He should have done this way before that... Didn't he lose his marriage from this? I feel sorry for the guy. It's a tough job...
The one upside here is we should get to see the foreign interference report before any new election, but otherwise agreed.
There’s some impetus to stay on to bring some stability when Trump comes into office. A Shock Doctrine approach (new leader at the same time as the US gets one) is going to create an environment where a number of regressive policies will get pushed through.
There’s a good chance Trump will say that he endorses Pierre Pollievre in the coming months causing a number of Canadians to turn their nose at him. This is also a calculated risk.
More Canadians approve of Trump than of Trudeau
https://www.thestar.com/politics/federal/canadians-want-a-to...
Poll is about an individual, not direction of the country.
Well, I mean he has a history of just burying his head in the sand with every controversy and eventually they all went away after a short time.
The strategy clearly worked for him until it didn't.
very true. love him or hate him, Trudeau deserves credit for surviving not just sexual assault allegations, but also the infamous blackface/brownface pictures[0], all during the height of #MeToo and leftist focus on identity politics. he wisely identified that the correct response was no response, except for notably stating that the sexual assault accuser simply "experienced their encounter differently"[1]. a lesser politician would have apologized, a tacit admission of guilt, and been forced to resign.
this isn't meant to be snippy or sarcastic, either. he was genuinely excellent at playing the political game and protecting his own career.
[0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-votes-2019-trudeau-b...
[1] https://toronto.ctvnews.ca/people-experience-things-differen...
Don't leave out the SNC-Lavalin ethics breaches!
Good point.
was anyone trading this on the prediction markets? only checked Polymarket, saw 3, but they didn't look very large
could have been a good time!
I'm having trouble learning anything from this stream of disconnected, time-sorted tweetlike objects. I'm posting this on the off chance that a better article exists, and someone can point me to it. I assume it's too early for that though.
(This was posted when the top link was https://www.bbc.com/news/live/clyjmy7vl64t. We've since changed the URL.)
I find CTV to be pretty good and centered: https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/justin-trudeau-stepping-down...
Much better, thank you.
Canada has no term limit. Leaders stay on until they have lost the support of their party.
Often that happens after a devastating election loss.
In this case it is happening because of his extreme unpopularity before the election and his parties hope of improving their election prospects under a different leader
Have they ever thought of implementing a term limit? I’m confused why they think that is not necessary.
Elections have a deadline after which a new election can be called, but there's no number of terms served that then stops a re-elected leader from taking office if they win another election. It's not the case that people can just stay in office without holding elections forever.
The Prime Ministership is by convention and not defined in a constitution
Westminster parliamentary tradition works on a lot of unwritten convention.
Does this type of role have a term limit anywhere? e.g. US house speaker doesn't have a term limit.
you can't compare the US here. a prime minister is not just like a speaker of the house. in many countries world wide the prime minister takes on most of the responsibilities that in the US are fulfilled by the president. the prime minister effectively runs the country, while the president is just a figure head having mostly ceremonial duties. the role of the president in the US is different, and an exception to the common rule.
at least some of the reasons why the US president has a term limit could therefore also apply to other countries prime ministers.
The US president has way way way more power than the Prime Minister.
The prime minister is more or less a privileged PM.
He is not the head of the military, cannot create executive orders or anything of the like.
that is true, but in the countries with a prime minister i know about, as far as i am aware, noone has that kind of power. in other countries the concept of an executive order appears not to even exist. in my brief search i only found something comparable in france can be issued by the council of ministers. everywhere else only parliament can do that. nevertheless in those countries the prime minister is the most powerful person running the country, and the president is a figurehead.
The goal isn't to learn, it's to be entertained
the goal isn't even to entertain. It is to spend time on a page. It doesn't matter if you are frustrated, angry, or confused. just keep scrolling
The CBC doesn't have remotely the same pressure to expose eyeballs to advertising.
the link wasn't to CBC when I posted, but I'm sure they have OKMs about clicks and time on page.
> Trudeau, who is now answering questions from reporters, said his one regret of his premiership has been his failure to introduce electoral reform.
Oh please, you had lots of time to address this and instead you've just handed us to the conservatives.
Electoral reforms are only proposed by those who think they'll benefit from them.
> Electoral reforms are only proposed by those who think they'll benefit from them
There is a long history of this not being true, particularly by outgoing leaders. See, for example, how Nixon almost abolished the electoral college.
Almost? The proposed amendment that passed the House but failed in the Senate? If 3/4 of the states were going to pass an amendment then why wouldn't 2/3 call for a convention of the states?
> proposed amendment that passed the House but failed in the Senate
Yes. Read the history of its support. If Nixon’s SCOTUS pick hadn’t been tanked the amendment would have likely passed.
> If 3/4 of the states were going to pass an amendment then why wouldn't 2/3 call for a convention of the states?
One of these is more drastic than the other.
True. And I believe every system will eventually be gamed to some amount. You do occasionally need change. But if you were to artificially enforce some "full rewrite" reform e.g. every n decades, that reform would just end up a tug of war between sides already deep into the existing gaming, trying to increase the effect of whatever tactic their side excels in.
One candidate for a possible workaround that I've occasionally been speculating about would be an organized process where n groups are tasked with doing n "rewrites" in parallel, and then a process that somehow mixes approval and random selection to pick one. The rationale would be the hope that the low chance of a particular rewrite actually making it would add some distance, would reduce the gaming-the-system incentives. Everybody has some amount of motivation to actually design a fair system, but that's competing with incentive to make it gameable by whatever side the co-author in question is on. But that fairness incentive would not really be diminished much by writing a what-if instead of a definitive future, whereas the incentive to deliberately flaw the would-be system to make it easier to game gets lower with a shrinking likelihood of the proposal actually getting implemented.
Was it failure to introduce ranked voting, or failure to introduce electoral reform?
There was multiple systems being suggested. NDP preferred MMP. Personally I wanted STV, but the Liberal party wanted alternate vote, the system that would benefit them the most.
Once they realized public and other party support was for systems other than Alternative Vote they backed out.
Who is "us"?
Yeah that is a good question to OP
The predicted conservative win if the election happens right away, would be a landslide in every sense of that word
No, it would be a landslide only in one sense, the first past the post sense. Not in any other sense. The majority of individuals would still not want the cons in power, but with FPTP the left vote gets split.
Would it be possible for it to not happen right away? They are in a minority government without a PM, I really wonder if there's a way the elections aren't triggered basically instantly.
With Trudeau leaving, I suspect that at least one of the other parties will give them enough time to elect a new leader before bringing down the government. The government may even last until the required election date of late October however, nothing of any importance will likely be passed in that time
He stays on until late march, they need to select a new party leader and then an elections held
Unfortunately, the liberal party rules say they require a minimum of four months to elect a new leader. They may be able to fast track it in three months, but it’s entirely up to the liberal party so I suspect Trudeau will still be leader when Parliament resumes.
They will ask the Governor General for a prorogation during the leader selection process so Parliament will not be resuming any time soon.
I wonder if he could still do it last minute. Like could we switch to proportional representation in the last months? It’d be a better system and may even (cynically) help his own party in the next election so there’d be some incentive.
They don't want proportional representation. If they did, they would have had it. Trudeau killed the electoral reform committee precisely because the NDP and Bloc insisted the would only accept PR and not Ranked Ballots (Trudeau's preference) and the Conservatives would prefer no change at all.
PR would force the Liberals to co-govern in coalition with the NDP basically forever. They don't want it. Their enthusiasm for Ranked Ballots is for the opposite reason: they realize they are the 2nd choice of "most" Canadians (or were until the last few months...). Given that, and the near-extinction event they suffered pre-2015 and the rise of Trudeau II, you can understand why they'd prefer that...
BC perplexingly chose otherwise. People always seem to hate this. Even here in California, we’re lucky to be able to rank everyone in SF but few other cities can. And every election, there’s a lot of “IRV is ruining this city” when candidates with fewer first choice votes win.
Alaska got Ranked Choice Voting and after every election cycle where a Democrat wins they're up in arms about how it's bad. This time the repeal effort got within a whisker of succeeding, while the Democrat (Mary Peltola) lost her congressional seat.
RCV encourages moderation, meaning candidates like Peltola and Senator Murkowski (R) win statewide office. This distresses people who feel like such moderates are very far from their own views.
Ranked choice isn't the only alternative voting system that encourages moderation. Approval voting is vastly simpler to understand and implement and also accomplishes many of the same benefits.
Simplicity is an underrated value when it comes to elections. People are more likely to trust that which they can easily understand. And ranked choice, fairly or not tends to cause a lot of confusion.
Unfortunately, I rarely see people who hate IRV/RCV because they want it replaced with approval voting. Usually it's that their candidate/party of choice would fare worse under it.
approval voting is also just more accurate and resistant to tactical behavior.
https://www.rangevoting.org/BayRegsFig
> This distresses people who feel like such moderates are very far from their own views
It pisses off people who don’t understand compromise.
They don't want to compromise, agreed.
But they know they live in a state where any presidential candidate with (R) next to their name can win by 10-20 points. So they wonder how such a state can elect a Democrat without something underhanded going on. A working theory is that the RCV system is "too confusing" for some folks and it leads to the D candidate winning an "undeserved" victory.
The Duchess of Alaska is a "moderate" only insofar as her first and overriding loyalty is to the what the permanent Federal Civil Service in DC wants. She'll agree with anyone of any ideological stripe so long as she knows the will of the bureaucracy is being carried out.
Unlike most states, Alaska is heavily dependent on the federal government due to the massive defense footprint and ANCSAs.
I hear you and this is such a lazy argument against IRV. Do they really lack the imagination to understand why this is a feature, not a bug in IRV?
IRV, though imperfect, is so clearly superior to one candidate voting if the goal is a responsive democracy. Unfortunately, there are many people who don't want that. IRV closes a loophole for extreme candidates (I have a strong suspicion that the 2016 djt campaign would have been thwarted by IRV had the gop primary used it). It also allows partially aligned challengers to pressure incumbents without dividing the electorate. This would likely be better for the challenger and the incumbent. Consider this past election where Jill Stein was demonized as a spoiler, which she potentially was, but would not have been in ranked choice. I bet there are a lot of voters who would have rather voted for Jill Stein but instead cast their vote for a candidate whom they thought could win (including candidates who received what should have been Jill Stein votes and thus lost important information about what matters to their voters). This is bad for everyone except those who don't believe in responsive democracy and largely rewards career politicians, political consultants and lobbyists.
I remember when he first ran that was one of his planks.
> instead you've just handed us to the conservatives
I agree that the conservatives are not a good choice, but apparently for the opposite reason as you - the conservatives are unlikely to be able to fix much of the damage Trudeau has inflicted on the country, especially w.r.t. unfettered immigration.
The PPC is the only one with any sensible policies IMO, but unfortunately they won't be competitive in the upcoming national election.
[flagged]
You're welcome. And thanks for offering your unasked for and useless input.
I hope Canada does not go the "Trump" Route. But from people in Canada I know, they think that is distinct possibility.
The frustrations are certainly similar:
> Trudeau has faced mounting pressure to resign amid polling that showed his ruling Liberal Party was likely to be swept out of power in the next election by the opposition Conservative Party. The prime minister has also become deeply unpopular over a range of issues, including the soaring cost of living and immigration. His leadership as further thrown into question when his finance minister abruptly quit in December.
https://www.newsweek.com/justin-trudeau-resigning-support-co...
As someone with no knowledge of the topic, why was electrical reform needed? Wouldn't one assume that either party motivated to do it while in power would be doing it with the goal of positively affecting the outcome for their party in the future? It would seem weird for a candidate to reform how voting works knowing it could negatively affect their side, right?
> why was electrical reform needed?
Canada uses a first past the post system for federal elections, which usually boils down to a two party state equilibrium
> It would seem weird for a candidate to reform how voting works knowing it could negatively affect their side, right?
Possibly, but I want to believe that politicians can put country over party (I haven't found a huge amount of evidence for this though unfortunately)
> Canada uses a first past the post system for federal elections, which usually boils down to a two party state equilibrium
To be fair, that two-party equilibrium is the thing that keeps every minor political crisis from causing no-confidence votes and failed governments because all of the special interests involved break the coalition.
Other Parliamentary governments that don't have this kind of equilibrium end up with minor political parties holding massively outsized influence and concessions just to keep them in the coalition. See Denmark (this is pretty much the subject of every season of Borgen).
The only time a Finnish government coalition has failed due to a loss of confidence was in the early 80s. Prime ministers occasionally change mid-term and minor parties sometimes leave the coalition, but the coalition always continues until the next regular elections.
And the reason for this stability is trivial. If a party leaves a coalition and the coalition loses parliamentary majority, that party is effectively a major party. Potential prime ministers are rarely stupid enough or desperate enough to give small parties that kind of power. Instead, they prefer making the coalition a bit wider by adding another small party or two.
We also have the Swedish People's Party, which specializes as a reliable coalition partner. They are willing to collaborate with pretty much anyone. As long the coalition agrees to uphold the rights of the Swedish-speaking minority, they will give it another 4-5% support without too much drama.
Finland is also just about the most ethnically, religiously, demographically and linguistically homogenous nation you could pick from.
That affords you the social cohesion to avoid these things. Much moreso than Denmark and orders of magntitude moreso than Canada.
You just generally agree with each other more, in your own socially-distant, Finnish way. Kippis!
Also the comments about the Swedish-speaking minority interest are a bit weird in historical context -- Swedish used to be the dominant language in Finland until the Swedish-speaking nobility decided to promote the Finnish language and identity. It isn't exactly weird that their remnants today would be able to promote their own interests...
Your perception of Finland is stuck in the 20th century. Today's Finland is roughly 10% immigrants. If the current trend continues, the fraction should increase to ~15% by 2030. That would be comparable to the US.
As for the Swedish-speaking minority, it's mostly a result of colonization in the middle ages. Swedish became the dominant language in some coastal areas, while the rest of present-day Finland spoke a variety of Finnic languages. During both Swedish and Russian rule, Swedish was used as the administrative language, and the elites used it among themselves. But even among the elites, Swedish was often not their native language.
> Finland is also just about the most ethnically, religiously, demographically and linguistically homogenous nation you could pick from.
Considering it has pretty much had effectively two primary languages for the past several hundreds years that seems like a stretch? Two of the most famous Finns of all time like Linus Torvalds or Mannerheim didn't even speak Finnish as their first language. Not exactly a sign of "linguistic homogeneity"..
Australia is a good counter example.
We use preferential voting and haven't had a minority government, that is a government formed by coalition as the result of an election since 2010. We still typically have 2 major parties and 3-4 minor parties that can (but by no means always) hold the balance of power, particularly in the senate. It means that the govt has to compromise more often to get bills passed, but the minority parties rarely hold legislation hostage (barring things like the Housing Future Fund, which was a dog's breakfast).
We have two left parties that votes are split across, and a single right party.
This means the conservative party often ends up getting more power since they're "first past the post" even though the majority of the population may not agree with them.
> and a single right party
No longer true. Canada now also has the PPC - the People's Part of Canada (see: https://www.peoplespartyofcanada.ca/).
> even though the majority of the population may not agree with them
Well that certainly won't be true for the upcoming election.
I beg to differ, the polls say otherwise regarding who the population wants and more importantly, the unhealthy coalition of NDP / Liberals have been preventing the parliament from functioning, we would have had an election by now had NDP stopped propping the Liberal party by preventing the non confidence vote.
So? "The rules need to be changed because the wrong people keep winning" sounds very suspicious to me.
If the situation is as you describe, what really needs to change is that the two left parties need to merge, or one of them needs to become such a marginal player that it doesn't matter. If the leaders of those parties can't or won't do that, well, then you get the situation that you have.
> So? "The rules need to be changed because the wrong people keep winning" sounds very suspicious to me.
That's not what they're saying. In Canada, we can easily end up with parliamentary majorities for parties that have less than 50% of the popular vote. Sometimes substantially less.
No, I got that part. That's true in any first-past-the-post system, and especially true in ones with more than two major parties. (The solution to that would be proportional representation rather than first-past-the-post.)
But the complaint seemed to be, not that it kept happening, but that it kept favoring the Conservatives. So, on the one hand, the fact that it keeps favoring one party is an issue. On the other hand, the way the complaint was made makes it sound like it's not coming from a position of objectivity.
Some believe that it’s better if representative democracies represent their constituents. Newer voting technology that permits a greater alignment of representative distribution with voter distribution is preferable to those people.
Personally, I find it galling that the massive Californian population of Republicans and Texan population of Democrats frequently go unrepresented.
You seem to believe in the primacy of FPTP voting in itself. That’s the difference.
> You seem to believe in the primacy of FPTP voting in itself. That’s the difference.
You seem to be reading things into my words that I didn't say.
I get that more representative is good. I get that FPTP isn't that.
But what I said is, when their complaint is that the Conservatives keep winning, that makes their whole argument suspect.
That seems a misunderstanding of their argument. I suggest using an LLM, quoting the comment, and discussing with it till your comprehension matches that of the machine. They’re usually pretty good at it, and it appears better than you in this instance.
The GOP has used the party in power manipulation to keep themselves in power very effectively at the state level with gerrymandering.
Canada has a FPTP system but multiple parties. This means that it becomes possible to form a distorted, outsized government (even a majority government!) with a remarkably little amount of the popular vote. In 2019 the Liberals won the election and took 46% of the seats with a mere 33% of the vote. That is a remarkable distortion.
The argument as to why electoral reform is needed is because of this distortion and the view that the FPTP system itself is resulting in peculiar outcomes that do not reflect the actual wishes of the voting public.
In a functional organization, personal interests are balanced against ideals, decorum, and the interests of the group.
It was one of his core promises back in 2015. He almost instantly broke it when he got elected, by saying it won't happen.
People are failing to read between the lines here.
Trudeau wanted electoral reform. But only one kind of electoral reform. A ranked ballot system.
When he couldn't get that, because the NDP and Bloc said "No F'ing Way" (for reasons I'll get into below), he sabotaged the whole committee and forced it shut.
After that he only had minority governments. So there was no way he was going to re-open the issue because he still wouldn't get the result he wanted.
Why ranked ballots, and why are the NDP opposed to them?
Because in a ranked ballot system the Liberals would be the 2nd choice of the majority of Canadians. It would effectively end the NDP as a viable electoral party. At least that's now the NDP saw it. I think a look at other ranked ballot system countries would definitely provide evidence that it tends to produce two-party system outcomes (see Australia, effectively a two party system)
The NDP's preference is for a Mixed Member Proportional system like in Germany. As a partner in a coalition minority gov't with Trudeau there is no way they would have accepted anything else. And key people in the Liberal party will never ever accept such a system, since it would mean governing forever along with the NDP, their ideological opponent (no matter what other people might tell you.)
So, yeah, screw Trudeau, and thank god he's gone (he should have resigned after he failed a majority last time around), but I think people need to dig more on this issue and why he might be saying this:
He wants "electoral reform" and regrets not getting it, because if they had accomplished what they wanted (ranked ballots), they would probably have a good chance at another election win. Yikes.
As a close watcher of Canadian politics, here's the best summary I can offer for those not familiar:
Overal Picture
Canada has seen gdp-per-capita decline for nearly every quarter over the past 3 years. Large stimulus spending during the pandemic fueled the housing crisis and added massive inflation. Stimulating the economy through similarly massive increases in Non-Permanent Residents has kept GDP afloat, but come at the cost of over-burdening public institutions and housing. Contiuing either policy is not possible and deeply unpopular. Canadians now pay more taxes than any US state, have housing more expensive than New York, but with productivity below that of the poorest state and our dollar running a major discount. This while our public instutions are struggling to meet demand.
1. Recurring themes in Canadian Politics
2. Recent history of the federal liberals
3. Current issues facing the government
Recurring Themes in Canadian Politics
- Unlike the U.S. where there are multiple strong centers of politics and commerce (East Cost, West Coast, Texas), Canada political power is centered largely along the St. Lawrence River where most of the country's population lives.
- Trends arising from this include: Quebec receiving, relative to its population, outsized benefits and influence in exchange for remaining part of the country and as result of French speaking requirements for the federal government. Quebec has nearly exited the country several times
- Canada is still largely a resource-based economy and possess an impressive amount of natural resources: oil, natural gas, largest uranium reserves in the world, more freshwater than all other countries combined, etc.
- The concentration of power in the East while most resource development happening in the West, creates a quasi-colonial between the Ontario/Quebec and the younger and resource heavy provinces, particularly the Prairies.
- Economically, Canada priviledges large incumbent businesses and most of its sectors are oligopolies. The reasoning for doing so historically has been to fend of larger, well funded US competitors.
Recent History of the federal liberals
- Liberals have historically have been centrist party, taking popular ideas from both socialist NDP (who have yet to win a federal election) and the federal Conservative party (itself a coaltion of social and fiscal conservatives created by Harper in the 90s).
- 2015 Justin Trudeau came in as the most popular Prime Minister in history with a majority government. Major legislation included legalizing weed and improvements to Child Benefits. The majority was lost in 2019 with Conservatives gaining the popular vote.
Overall Picture - In Detail
- Economic Issue #1: Lagging economy. Canada is still largely a resource based economy (see above) and business investment in that sector, and Canada overall, declined drastically starting in 2015, arguably due to increasing opportunities for resource development in the U.S. and the Canadian Federal Government stance towards non-reweables. Business investment is more a leading indicator, but still a major economic issue for Canada.
- Economic Issue #2: Increased cost of housing. Canadian housing costs in major cities has reached crisis levels even leading up to the pandemic. Our major cities like Toronto and Vancouver are some of the most unaffordable in the world. Most people who have been in Canada have seen housing in their cities go from achieveable-if-expensive (in major regions) to impossibly unaffordable. Most major cities now require 30+ of saving (at the average income) for a downpayment with a salary in the top 1% to purchase a home.
- Economic issue #3: Large inflation, combined with increased costs from consolidated markets with little competition. Not unlike other countries post-pandemic, but reports show major costs of living such as groceries have seen above-inflation levels of price increases due to industry consolidation. I.E. Many parts of Canada have one 2 major suppliers of grociers
- Immigration Issue #1: Non-permanent Residents. Canada has 2 classes of immigrants (aside from Refugees, whih make up a small number): Permanent Residents (PR's) and Non-permanent residents (NPR's). Our PR system is what is widely hailed as one of the best in the world and a point of Canadian pride. The NPR system has been substantially expanded under the Trudeau government and arguably exploited with millions of NPR's entering as temporary workers and university students. NPR's now consist of over 7% of the population (larger than then Indigenous population).
- Social Cohesion: most of Canada's public services (healthcare, teaching, even postal services, etc) have seen substantial degradation and a struggle to meet capacity.
- Lastly, it should be noted that Canada has tax system well above any US state. Historically, most Canadians have not have a problem with this because of the relative strength of our public institutions.
Current Issues facing the Goverment
- If the federal liberals have an election, they will lost most of their seats. They may even lose party status. They will likely avoid this at all costs.
- The federal NDP are not projected to lose seats, but will lose influence they gain by upholding the minority government. They gain little from a federal election.
- Given an early election is not likely and Trudeau is facing revolts internally (his key finance minister and deputy PM resigned publicly in the past few weeks), the choice is to stop parliment while they look for a new PM (trudeau may act as the interim). If they choose an existing MP for PM (maybe Freeland) they risk being associated with a deeply unpopular party. If they chose an outsider (like Mark Carney), they risk just as much backlash for an unelected PM.
It's crazy how many of your points are related to housing, and how many of them would be fixed or at least massively improved by a land value tax.
Really appreciate the summary! As a Canadian these things feel very obvious but since most of this site is from the US this should help the conversation a lot.
* Putting money directly in pockets tends to cause inflation in everything, but especially durable assets. Their relative worth increases compared to currency by simple supply and demand principle, because the supply of currency has increased.
* This sort of double-counts the same phenomenon, but stimulus is largely implemented via interest rate policy. When interest rates fall, people are more willing to pay higher prices for the big-ticket items that will be financed for many years (since the sticker price is offset by lower amortization costs; what people really care about is what their monthly bill will be after all the math is done).
* The pandemic itself directly motivated some demand for housing in smaller centers, as wealthy people got the idea that they could reduce their COVID risk by living somewhere less densely populated. This was also seen in the US e.g. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/15/style/rich-people-fled-ne... . Even if they put up their city residences for sale at the same time, they'd have to find buyers. (Housing, as an asset, is not particularly liquid or fungible. While economists strongly agree that rent controls don't work and the way to solve the problem is to build more housing, it also needs to be housing in places where it actually helps. Which is realistically going to require major zoning reform - the simple existence of millions of square kilometers of undeveloped land isn't really relevant.)
interesting, so if understand correctly; basically put, a side effect of the stimulus was that more people took out loans for homes, its that right?
This is a good summary that captures the discourse in Canada presently, very different from what people seem to be focusing on here on HN.
One caveat: as far as I know, taxation in Canada is pretty similar to New York or California.
This thread should be locked. It's unbelievable the BS being spewed by all sides of the political spectrum.
Ultimately, the Canadian democracy has wanted a new prime minister for years and it's abhorrent it has (and is) taking this long to let the citizens vote.
I got downvoted to hell for suggesting these posts be removed altogether. They contribute nothing of value here.
[flagged]
> Trudeau has also been friendly - and perhaps even submissive - to Xi Jinping
Gonna need to see a source on that. Canada even arrested Huawei executive Meng Wanzhou on behalf of the US on some made-up sanctions charges so that America could pressure the Chinese government in their trade war. The other part about Khalistan is a talking point from Modi's India, which has been busted for conducting assassinations against Khalistani activists in Canada and the US.
Constitutionalism is whatever, but it is interesting how much more dogmatically divided Canada seems to be getting under the decidedly more authoritarian administration of Trudeau. Everyone's worried about violence and terrorism but terrorists are a, semantically, political construct and a product of authoritarianism and inequality.
I wonder what this says about where the US is headed..........
[flagged]
[flagged]
Flamebait like this will get you banned here, regardless of how right you are or feel you are.
No more of this, please—it just leads to predictable, tedious internet hell.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42612168.
Edit: we've had to warn you about this kind of thing for years:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32890469 (Sept 2022)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30334539 (Feb 2022)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19946008 (May 2019)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17660350 (Aug 2018)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16545769 (March 2018)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13900218 (March 2017)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9983880 (July 2015)
Edit 2: you've posted 3 dozen comments in this thread, breaking the site guidelines left and right. WTF? I don't want to ban you (obviously, having cut you almost 10 years of slack already) but this is beyond the pale. You've been here for 12 years and ought to be a much better citizen of this place. First and foremost, that has to do with how you treat people (and positions) that you disagree with. If you want to keep posting to Hacker News, please fix this once and for all.
[flagged]
It's true that some of your 3 dozen comments in this thread were fine, but you were still breaking the site guidelines in many places. Here are some obvious examples:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42615237
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42613907
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42613574
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42613325
No one who has read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and wants to use HN as intended should be posting such things. These are not borderline cases. The fact that some of your other posts were fine doesn't make it ok, any more than helping old ladies cross the street makes it ok to rob banks. I wish it were otherwise, but moderation has to go by bad deeds, not good deeds.
[flagged]
Even people charged with actual violent crimes still have access to their money. Funds seizure is a while other level of fucked up.
And those weren't the people that got their rights suspended by emergency powers, so what's your point?
According to that logic, the protestors during the Oka Crisis should've just been arrested, stripped of their rights and treated like non citizens since they were armed and threatened the police. Yet a better government back then realized that you can't just use emergency powers for every inconvenience, and didn't use them. They instead talked and engaged in discussions with them, which resolved the Oka Crisis peacefully.
> peacefully
Well, apart from the fighting and that young woman who was bayoneted while carrying her infant sister.
I’m not here to carry water for the asshat truckers, and I don’t understand the Canadian constitution or legal system, but the Oka Crisis was resolved with enough brutality for at least one crow pie.
Ok, I agree to be honest. I shouldn't have said peacefully, but rather without the emergency powers hammer.
In fact, the federal government tried appeasement whereas the provincial government was more brutal.
All 20?
Also, is this like when the FBI discovers a plot to kidnap a Governor and half of the conspirators are paid FBI informants?
[flagged]
What does "law" mean to you? Do the "Emergency acts" not count as law in your opinion?
It counts as farce. The law literally as passed states that the law itself is not capable of dealing with the situation, so it is law to deal with the situation.
It's a clear sign that your government is failing its responsibilities. The US has done it too.
Your government is with a straight face telling you that it doesn't legitimately have enough control over you so it needs to create extra-legal means of having control over you.
It's tyranny. There's a reason these acts only can get passed in war time. The population is too busy pissing its pants to realize when it's getting shafted.
[flagged]
[flagged]
[flagged]
[flagged]
> you should be glad that we're just speaking to each other over the internet
You may want to take a step back from the keyboard.
I'm perfectly calm. It's the people with pitchforks screaming about how horn honking is terrorism who have a problem.
The comment I responded to sounded like a threat. If that wasn’t your intention it may benefit from being reworded.
[flagged]
> how horn honking is terrorism
They conspired to murder police officers [1]. That goes far beyond honking horns.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_alleged_plot_to_kill_Cout...
In war there are no rights. Once you cross the line from peacef protestor to terrorist going to kill people/cops, the saying goes “fuck your rights”
So all you need is a politician to declare the opposition party to be terrorist and you can do whatever you want?
That's incredibly convenient for people who have no qualms labeling their political opposition as "terrorists".
[flagged]
I mean... The gold rush ended about 200 years ago but if you really think Dawson City is worth fighting NATO for, then I suppose that's a choice you can make.
your first instinct was a military operation?
the US has acquired territories before from a couple people in those territories realizing it was a magical way for unrelated tariffs to disappear.
history gives you the blueprint, the writing is on the wall
Honestly, Canada merging with the US would not be a bad thing. There are articles discussing Canada joining the EU. What’s the difference between being a state within the US and a country that is basically a state, within the EU? A lot of Canada - especially outside of certain cities like Vancouver - share foundational values with the US much more so than the EU.
[flagged]
[flagged]
[flagged]
A disturbing number of people will agree and ignore your sarcasm.
Yes it's the first time in a long time that a member of the Castro family has not run a major government.
These days they apparently spell it Castreau.
I suppose the meme is still going around about Pierre Trudeau being cucked by a certain foreign leader?
It's not just a meme. Well, the side-by-side comparison photos of Justin and Fidel are a meme in the widely spread sense. But it is a fact that in April 1971 the Trudeaus were a) in the Caribbean for two weeks and b) did not publish their schedule, including at least one visit to an undisclosed island. Justin was born in December 1971.
Add to that c) the remarkably familiar way Fidel, Pierre, and Margaret acted toward each other in Fidel's first official meeting with them in 1976, and d) Justin's remarkably laudatory statement on Fidel's death.
I will always say that Justin is the best product of the Cuban Revolution!
Well, then you don't know Canadians.
[flagged]
You might want to take a look at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42614703, which I posted earlier today, answering a somewhat similar question.
Thanks for keeping the site what it is. Can't be easy work.
> Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
same applies to comments
Why did you even click through? The title made it very clear this discussion was political. 29/30 of the stories on the HN front page are technical, click on those instead.
[flagged]
[flagged]
[flagged]
lol this incredible hyperbole begs for explanation.
The two main fumbles I can see of note are on housing and immigration.
On immigration the government only made remarkable changes in the last two years, and as if they touched a hot stove, they already realized their mistake and have already scaled back immigration numbers so much that Canada will effectively have nil immigration for the near future. Not likely a generational issue here.
On housing well I agree it'll take a generation to fix it but that was already the case before the Liberals took power. Very much an example of the future is already here but not yet distributed as Toronto and Vancouver were already experiencing a housing crisis in 2014.
Less an issue of what the libs actively did wrong but more an issue of how slow they were to act on the fact that Canada has had bad housing policy since the 1990s and few jurisdictions are taking things seriously. Fed housing policy at this instant is actually pretty good in that it is mirroring and supporting the good BC NDP housing policy. It'll take a long while though for homes to get built and likely things will get worse as the Conservatives scale back on investment.
One major change that happened with immigration is that the provinces (particularly - but not exclusively - Ontario) slashed funding for schools and encouraged them to make up for it by profiting off of a near infinite supply of foreign students.
Education is a provincial responsibility; the feds basically rubber stamped student visas, under the assumption that provinces were to be trusted for only accrediting responsible schools; schools that would import the best and brightest from around the world and train them to be valuable contributors to the country. That assumption faltered - instead, private strip-mall colleges began bringing in absolutely anybody with a pulse who could pay sky-high foreign tuition fees. Conestoga College in Kitchener-Waterloo, most notoriously, increased their foreign student enrollment by ~1500% - to nearly 30,000 students, 3/4 of the student population - putting enormous pressure on the city (which is not a very big city).
I think it's fair to blame the Libs for being asleep at the wheel while this happened, but I wish more ire was directed towards the provinces for this.
Isn’t the housing crisis caused at the local level? City officials control the permits/zoning.
> In 2020, Canada ranked 37 out of 38 for municipal approval process timeline in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). We're 3 times slower than the United States. This is due to restrictive zoning practices, excessive red tape, and outdated processes.
https://housing-infrastructure.canada.ca/housing-logement/ho...
Absolutely, though the feds do have a significant impact via the tax code. The last period of time when lots of apartments were built in the 1960s-70s was a period of time when there was oodles of tax giveaways to apartment builders.
Additionally in that period the federal government was deeply involved in funding the development of publicly owned housing and coops. That ended in the late 80s and by the time of the main austerity budget of the Chretien Liberals in '93 the Feds were completely uninvolved in funding social housing.
So yeah a long period of nil social housing funding and few incentives to build housing and no real surprise that the country got to a point where it was severely underbuilding.
> On immigration the government only made remarkable changes in the last two years, and as if they touched a hot stove, they already realized their mistake and have already scaled back immigration numbers so much that Canada will effectively have nil immigration for the near future.
From government of Canada[1]:
> reducing from 500,000 permanent residents to 395,000 in 2025
> reducing from 500,000 permanent residents to 380,000 in 2026
> setting a target of 365,000 permanent residents in 2027
I don't know how that's "nil". The reduced numbers are still about 1% of Canada's population per year. Compare that to the us which had ~2.5 million immigrants or 0.7% of its population in 2022[2]. And most American seem to think that this is already too much.
[1] https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/ne...
[2] https://usafacts.org/state-of-the-union/immigration/
There are a huge number of temporary residents in Canada, either as students, or on a post-graduation work permit, or as temporary foreign workers. By cutting back on these programs bringing in temporary residents, and also slashing the permanent resident intake, many of these temporary residents will need to leave. As such, the government is projecting a net decrease in population over the next two years.
ah yeah I see where I confused myself. From the links you posted, immigration still exists, but the numbers will be so low that population growth is nil. In fact the document asserts that Canada will see a decrease in population. Unless "marginal" population is some specific variant of phrase that means something beyond the ~41M population number?
> The 2025–2027 Immigration Levels Plan is expected to result in a marginal population decline of 0.2% in both 2025 and 2026, before returning to a population growth of 0.8% in 2027.
The more relevant thing beyond the permanent resident numbers is the temporary numbers which are also being severely cut. Often a PR is someone who has already been in the country for quite some time whereas a temporary resident would be a new immigrant.
canada got to the point that they can't turn off the immigration faucet, they need it for their economy to survive, but people have come to hate it so much that they can't maintain it, they're in for a collapse because of it
> people have come to hate it so much that they can't maintain it, they're in for a collapse because of it
Considering how post-Brexit Britain panned out, the people in charge of policy will be pragmatic and allow immigration to resume just to prevent immediate collapse under their watch, even if re-opening the immigration gates is unpopular.
Non-immigrant Canadians will have to change their living expectations and use housing more effectively (density). Or perish.
When I was university-aged, all of my asian and indian international student friends were living like 11-14 people to an apartment.
I thought immigrants were here to save the economy. Why does everyone need to scale back to living like college students then?
Well, they are.
By scaling back and "living like college students" (living like families in most of the world except the US & Canada), they're going to be the only groups of people who have any buying power to buy new homes when they finally get constructed. Meanwhile y'all will continue bitching and moaning about how fucked you are while the immigrant generation laughs their way to comfortable retirement and a better future for their children in your country.
I think this is a pretty unsupportable position, even if you passionately and emotionally make a case for this with constructed evidence, it's still not a tenable position. I think you have an easier time making the case for a flat earth, quite frankly.
Can you elaborate or be more concrete in what you mean by this?
Is there an ELI5 that explains all of this from a-z? As an outsider I can't help but think people are being hyperbolic about it.
Mostly partisan propaganda. The "Canada is broken" slogan is by no means organic; it is a carefully executed propaganda piece. The conservative leader is very good with punch lines and communication in general (and is maybe a bit too proud of it - e.g. he has a "Justinflation" plaque in his office; a term that he coined).
There are problems and people want them fixed. That is always the case. In a short couple of years Canada will suddenly not be broken anymore, as everyone will forget the slogan. Then in a few more years the next opposition will decry how awful things are, etc. It is all very predictable and clear.
I feel like its sentiment like this why the liberal party is heading for a historic collapse.
"Everything is fine, just cancel disney+"
Like young people are struggling... really badly and it seems like the government has done everything they can to make it worse.
Most people I've met really don't Like Pierre Pollieve (myself included) but to say the current governments ineptness is propaganda is actually insane.
Well, that wasn't my comment at all. I was specifically stating that the "Canada is broken" rhetoric is largely propaganda. That is very different from saying "everything is fine".
Propaganda? I am the only one of my friend group with a house at 30 years old. Most have completely given up on home ownership, we just registered a 62B$ deficit and homelessness is the worse it's been in my living memory. Universities are balancing their budget by pumping their foreign student numbers and hospitals are so deep in the red access to a specialist for anything non life threathening like a dermatologist or allergologist puts you on a 22 months waiting list even with a physician recommandation...
Not sure what you definition of broken is, but considering our tax rate we are well within our rights to call it broken.
To most people those are not really so different. For something to not be broken means that it's mostly fine, more in order than not.
What do you call broken then?
Society is fundamentally not serving the prosperity of its younger generations. That is true in both the US and Canada. The wealth transfer upwards across generations is a breakdown of the social contract.
Millenials and younger have a great point, even if they articulate it poorly, and are being completely ignored but can't be for much longer. These demographics are just now coming into their political agency...
Your comment and the sibling comment touch on more or less the same issue - "what does 'broken' mean?".
We all agree there are problems, but does that justify saying "Canada is broken"? You start by saying that the US shares an issue with Canada. So is the US also broken? The sibling comment mentions other social and financial problems. Can we categorically say that a specific country is "broken" if it faces those issues?
From my perspective, calling a country "broken" is a very categorical statement, bringing to mind failed states, coups etc. I'm sure (or rather, hopeful) that we can all agree this isn't the case of Canada. When people say "broken" in this context, it is much more in the sense of "my car has a broken fuel line" than a commentary on how Canada is a Libya-style failed nation-state.
So in essence, "Canada is broken" is really "things are less good than they could or should be". That is the essence of my initial post - there are problems, yes; but the slogan is mostly inaccurate, ergo propaganda.
The "Canada is broken" people would also benefit from broader perspectives. I've lived most of my life in a developing country in the global south, so living here and seeing your definition of "broken" is a bit bewildering. I haven't lived here long enough to have seen how wonderful things were in the past decades, though, so who knows.
I do think the "Canada is broken" slogan works because there are some concerning issues and trends, but people need to realize they're decades-old trends that present politicians had little to do with.
I worry about Canada, but I don't care much about Trudeau's involvement, nor do I think any politicians in the race can do much about it.
It's tricky. I don't want to contribute to propaganda at all, in part because I believe it's manufactured by and serves the conservatives primarily, and I don't see their leader as anything close to a solution. Yet I don't want to pretend things are fine. Our economy doesn't look like it's on the right track, and the underpinnings of it seem to be corroding and failing. We're a very extractive, resource-intensive economy with very few new ideas, very few inventive or innovative programs or people, and little potential for making sweeping changes.
So, broken? Not really, and not more than most places. Canada is still incredible in so many ways. But on a good track? Utilizing our potential? Will my kids experience as healthy of an economy and society as I did at their ages? It doesn't seem like it, no.
Yes they are, it isn't that big a deal, a new talking head will be in power for a while and eventually the blame for any problems will shift to him.
I think it is a big deal. In many countries, you see a centre politician do some very normal thing that gets disingenuous outrage from the right solely with the intention (and effect) of dragging the Overton window over. From there, it is lather, rinse, repeat. The biggest reason for this is because capital has most of the power, most of the news outlets and capital is, of course, conservative.
When things do swing the other way, it is muted. Can you say Biden is more left than Obama? Were Harris' policies to the left of Biden's? Is Starmer's labour party more left than Corbyn's? On the whole, no.
Being "hyperbolic" is putting it generously.
No, because Canada is not "ruined" or "damaged".
The ONE dreadful thing the Liberals did was to renege on their promise of electoral reform. All Westminster-style Parliaments are done a disservice by using First-past-the-post. Trudeau campaigned on replacing the system with proportional representation, but incumbents in Westminster governments will never change the system that made them win.
Most people turn to the Carbon Tax as an example, but the Carbon Tax is implemented in such a way that the average family receives MORE in quarterly rebates than what they PAY in Carbon taxes; it's only those with very high incomes who come close to losing money from the tax[1].
Then they'll point to the pandemic and tell you that the worst thing we've ever done as a nation is ask people to get vaccinated and wear a mask during a time where a (not actually) unprecedented virus was rampant. And somehow the virus is the incumbent's fault.
After that you'll be told that healthcare is crumbling under Trudeau. Healthcare in Canada is a provincial responsibility, and the vast majority of provinces (eg Alberta) are run by right-wing governments looking to profit from private healthcare, so are employing a starve-the-beast strategy to make private healthcare look attractive.
And then some particularly weird people will tell you he isn't tough enough on trans people.
[1]: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/axe-the-tax-and-carbo...
What’s dreadful is the rising cost of living and lack of affordable housing, which he failed to address. Moreover he doubled immigration during a time when the average Canadian was struggling to keep up with rising expenses.
I’m pro-immigration but not at an unsustainable rate. Housing construction was not keeping up.
Trudeau pushed beyond the limits of pro-immigration policy. If it was just conservative propaganda, the liberals wouldn’t be looking at a potentially historic election loss based on current polling.
That said, I don’t think conservatives will fix anything.
The immigration system we use today was set up by Harper. I'm an immigrant myself, having moved here on a Harper scheme, but under Trudeau.
You are absolutely right that this wasn't addressed by the current government, but it is a policy of the previous one. The only reason he alone is being blamed is because he happened to be in charge for a very long time.
It is likely to remain unaddressed satisfactorily under PP, too, since landlords benefit from immigration (especially high turnover immigration) and his primary interest is landlords and business owners.
This is a symptom of FPTP-based Westminster governments. If we had a more equitable electoral system, the blame can be more appropriately distributed and - even better - the issues can be addressed more efficiently.
Democracy NEEDS turnover to be effective.
> The only reason he alone is being blamed is because he happened to be in charge for a very long time.
No, he was in charge when it got bad. A policy that doesn't harm the country one decade can harm the country the next. And it did, so the one who chose not to repeal it, and rather to make it much worse, gets blamed.
> the one who chose not to repeal it, and rather to make it much worse, gets blamed.
Trudeau did cut immigration and student numbers substantively, and made expensive and substantive changes to improve housing availability.
He can and should be blamed for doing so much too late, though.
You're blaming Harper? Trudeau has been in office for almost a decade.
Asking as a non-Canadian: What do you think he could have done that would fix these issues? If there is a clear path, why is it not politically attractive?
Very little, honestly.
Universities have been abusing the temporary student visa as an income stream. The universities are awash with temporary foreign students, being charged higher tuition fees than domestic students. Partly this is greed, but it's also because funding for post-secondary has been getting cut in most provinces. BUT AGAIN - post-secondary funding is a provincial issue, not something the federal government (ie Trudeau) can do much about.
Alberta, for example, cut post-secondary funding, so the universities in Alberta turned to foreign students to make up the shortfall. This increased rental demand A LOT.
The issues were self created by skyrocketing the immigration rates / TFWs.
All they had to do was .... nothing, just keep the system as it was.
With that it seems like there has been a lot of heavy lobbying by companies built on low wage employment to deflate wages across the country. And it worked!
Did he change the immigration rules? If not, how was he supposed to "keep the system as it was"?
They rapidly expanded the LMIA program which provisions visas for primarily low income work.
Additionally they realllly expanded the international student visa pool, without actually checking who they were granting visas to.
The result was that pretty much non existent colleges were created with the sole goal of allowing people to pay for a backdoor to try and get PR without high level education, skills or even language proficiency.
Lastly there used to be a cap on visas issued based an unemployment rate of 6% they removed that cap so despite unemployment being up to around 10% in major cities they are still granting tons of visas.
So yeah... They really went out of their way to expand the visa program as fast as possible with very little oversight.
Additionally in terms of actual background checks, those seemed to go out the door as Canada in the past few years has given PR to a number of people who are actively wanted terrorists as part os Isis and other terror groups
> Canada in the past few years has given PR to a number of people who are actively wanted terrorists as part os Isis and other terror groups
Do you have any links to articles on this?
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/eldidi-immigration-alleged-...
https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/terror-suspect-entered-canad...
Off the top of my head
My attempt at a neutral view:
- housing costs have skyrocketed and econmic growth has been lackluster
-- more importantly liberals have failed to articulate a convincing plan on this
- conservatives have been wildly succesful in the polls,causing the liberal party to fragment internally, which just further makes them look like they dont know what they are doing.
- trudeau has been in power a long time, people want change
- across the globe incumbants are having problems.
In terms of the grandparent, i don't really think there is much damage. I guess there is a high budget deficit. Not sure what that poster is referring to.
For the commenters that think this is hyperbole, here is my counter argument:
Inflation is a generational issue because prices have gone up and has made all Canadians poorer and this won't be undone until we have deflation (via a recession? more pain) or until wages increase faster than inflation does.
What are the chances we have deflation? Not likely when our Canadian Dollar is being devalued and Bank of Canada continues to decrease interest rates. Costs more and more for Canadians to import goods.
What would trigger wages or savings to increase beyond inflation in Canada at this point? All foreign investment has dried up. It will take many years to make Canada attractive again to foreigners and years before companies mobilize to come back. Maybe more export of oil and gas via pipeline or LNG terminals would help but that is not popular (Keystone XL is dead).
Out of control gov't spending (which has fed inflation) has cause gov't debt to sky rocket. This will take a generation to fix. First the new Conservative Gov't will have to get into power, then significantly cut spending (if they can). Reduction of gov't spending will reduce the economy (more pain).
If gov't is cutting spending, how will our medical system get better? It'll actually will get worse than it already is (more pain).
Immigration has caused rent and housing prices to go up. How long will this take to fix? We're not deporting anyone. Building new houses needs people who can afford new houses... did I mention inflation has made people poorer? How about a housing correction/crash (more pain)?
The damage that Trudeau has caused isn't done yet, even after he resigns. We're in for more pain.
> Inflation is a generational issue
Inflation has been present in every country on the planet. It's not much different in Canada than elsewhere.
There's a bit of a debate going on about how much carbon pricing ("tax") has effected food prices, with some claiming it has been a lot, but Canadian prices are about at the same (higher) level as the US and other places:
* https://twitter.com/andrew_leach/status/1875227680045723973
On the issue of housing, there is a decent argument that immigration numbers were too high for too long and that drove up demand:
* https://mikepmoffatt.medium.com/ontarians-on-the-move-2021-e...
Inflation would have been less if there was less immigration, less gov't spending, less tax... all of which Trudeau actively increased.
Consumption taxes, such as carbon taxes, are actually OK if you reduce the income taxes to offset. Consumption taxes can change behavior vs. a blanket income tax. (Inexplicably, he reduced GST (another consumption tax)... so he's not thinking deeply about tax theory or anything at all really)
Trudeau planned to continue to increase carbon taxes by 200% higher than they are today. Also compare gasoline prices from the US to Canada.
> All foreign investment has dried up.
This can't be emphasized enough. Canada has the highest household debt in the G7. There are no viable customers.
The only hope that you really have is something you're already doing -- mass immigration -- with all of the tradeoffs that come with it. Canada has to make a _fundamental_ change to get out of its current situation.
How is mass immigration going to help Canada stem inflation? It seems to be making that (and many other things, like crime) worse.
[flagged]
[flagged]
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42613957.
[flagged]
> This is what happens when NPCs try to become scientific experts based on random podcasts.
Attacking others will get you banned here, regardless of how right you are or feel you are.
It's also in your interest to edit swipes out of your comments here, quite apart from not getting banned on HN, because they discredit your position in the eye of the fair-minded reader (see https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... for lots of past explanations of that, if you care).
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
a basic revision of the scientific literature will show
Freudian slip?
"Revision" means "review" in parts of the English-speaking world, so probably not.
I had to sign a waiver absolving the government and vaccine makers of liability to get the vaccine that was required to keep my job. The vaccine I chose ended up getting pulled from the market due to the risk of blood clots. We now have the benefit of hindsight, but the authoritarian bent many governments gained during Covid should not be forgotten.
[flagged]
If you read all the papers then why is this not sourced?
I did source it, I just didn't provide links this time. Go dig out the old UK or danish reports or discussions of them from the time.
No links this time because I've posted on this topic dozens of times in the past over the years and was away from my bookmarks list at the time anyway. It didn't stop people flagging posts. They just pick fights with the sources or start making arguments long since resolved. There are whole websites devoted to explaining various aspects of what happened, look for Prof Norman Fenton's blog for an example if you want to get started.
The data set seems to be here: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsde...
Not sure what it implies, but there it is.
Not going to go and try to unearth it right now but everything he is saying about the figures coming out of England & Scotland is absolutely true, I saw it laid out on Twitter with links to the primary sources in real time.
I think my favorite trick here was categorizing people less than four weeks out from their second dose, or anyone who didn't get a second dose (likely as a result of a nasty reaction to the first shot, itself a good indicator of high susceptibility to COVID spike pathology), or anyone whose vaccine status was "unknown," as "unvaccinated."
Yep. One of many such statistical tricks. And as you can see from this thread, it works a treat...
[flagged]
Please edit swipes out of your HN posts, as the guidelines request: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Your comment would be fine without that first sentence.
Nothing will change because no Canadian government will lower house prices and that's what absolutely needs to happen.
2024 was a banner year for voting against the incumbent governments worldwide. Globally we have a cost-of-living crisis, a housing affordability crisis and a years-long decrease in the standard-of-living. Generally speaking, each country has 3 forces that are in play:
1. Progressives;
2. Neoliberals / centrists; and
3. Outright fascists.
The French election was a prime example of how this plyas out. Macron, a centrist, very much sided with the fascists rather than the progressives, such as who he picked to be Prime Minister after the snap election he called.
Some say the UK is an outlier with Labor winning a massive victory. It is not. The former Labor leader, Jeremy Corbyn, was weakened by a divided electorate so he could be character-assassinated in a coordinated campaign alleging anti-semitism to be replaced by a neoliberal centrist (Keir Starmer). Starmer actually got significantly fewer votes than Corbyn did in his two elections. All that happened was the right-wing vote got split between Conservatives and Reform.
The US election played out similarly. Despite evidence of Biden's cognitive decline being apparent as early as of Spring 2021, he ran for reelection and was supported by the Democratic establishment right up until a disastrous debate performance made clear his position was untenable. Nancy Pelosi reportedly wanted an open primary at the convention. Instead Kamala Harris was anointed as the Democratic establishment feared a progressive candidate would win a primary.
So we got a Wall Street approved centrist neoliberal platform that disrupted nothing and gave absolutely nothing to working people and had a policy platform on many issues (eg the death penalty, Israel-Palestine, immigration, deregulation) with almost no daylight between it and the Trump platform.
Unsurprisingly that platform lost, badly. Predictably.
The point here is that in every election, neoliberals are way more comfortable with (and will side with) fascists than leftists or pgoressives.
Voters, eager for change, will choose populism because they aren't being offered any alternative. But nobody wants to address the root causes here: housing unaffordability and massive wealthy inequality.
Too many people are invested in their house as an investment, as their nest-egg. House prices absolutely have to come down and nobody wants to hear that. Canada is a real estate bubble, just like pretty much every other Western nation.
People will cling to their house prices as society crumbles around them.
Bingo
> Canada is a real estate bubble, just like pretty much every other Western nation
Exacerbated by the fact opportunities limited to a few geographic hotspots.
100 million Canadians is not a bad idea once it starts developing other urban centres. But the first 20 million is going to try their hardest to shitup the GTA.
> 3. Outright fascists.
You say this like it's a given, but I'm not so sure anymore. The word fascist has lost most of its meaning by being applied to everyone from Donald Trump to J. K. Rowling. Can you explain specifically what you mean by this?
One steelman might be to replace "fascist" by "Malthusian populist", eg: someone who wants to decrease the national population of nonwealthy people to place less strain on what they see as a fixed pie of resources for the remaining "first-class" population.
While there is disagreement on the exact definition, Wikipedia sums it up pretty well [1]:
> Fascism is a far-right, authoritarian, and ultranationalist political ideology and movement,[1][2][3] characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural social hierarchy, subordination of individual interests for the perceived good of the nation or race, and strong regimentation of society and the economy
A good litmus test is to simply see how many parallels you can draw to Nazi Germany. So let's take a few points in relation to Trump:
- "far right": the attack on the bodily autonomy of women, attacks on LGBTQ (particularly T) people, etc
- "authoritarian": Hitler was elected (technically appointed) Chancellor before becoming a dictator. Trump was elected but it really took the Supreme Court to completely invent the idea of presidential immunity to make that happen. There is absolutely no constitutional basis for that decision. This, and various political moves to argue more power should be held by the executive, gets wrapped up in a psuedo-intellectual veneer like "unitary executive theory" [2];
- "ultranationalist": we just had an election campaign of outright race-baiting and villification not seen since 1930s Germany. It will be official government policy to build concentration camps and to use the military to round up undesirables;
- "belief in a antural hierarchy": well, that's just white supremacy.
As another parallel, it's worth noting that many on the right will argue that we need to root out "cultural Marcists" [3], which is eerily similar to Nazi-era "cultural Bolshevism" [4].
Another Nazi-era conspiracy is the Great Replacement [5], which has been resurgent in the last few years (eg [6]).
This isn't unique to the US as you'll see all of these traits in other countries (eg Reform in UK, AfD in Germany, National Rally in France).
Fun fact: one of National Front's founders (Petain) signed the armistice with Nazi Germany in 1940 so collaborated with Hitler as Vichy France [7].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unitary_executive_theory
[3]: https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/intelligence-report/...
[4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Bolshevism
[5]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Replacement_conspiracy_t...
[6]: https://www.npr.org/2023/04/25/1171800317/how-tucker-carlson...
[7]: https://www.france24.com/en/20180220-frances-jean-marie-le-p...
No government lowers housing prices. Additionally real estate rarely drops in price unless there is a major economic downturn. It isn't going to happen.
It's kind of an economic reality that prices are sticky upwards... To "lower" costs you need to raise wages.
On top of our absurd costs, our productivity is plummeting so there's no positive outlook here.
>Voters, eager for change, will choose populism because they aren't being offered any alternative. But nobody wants to address the root causes here: housing unaffordability and massive wealthy inequality.
Well then, frankly, given your apparent learning, try encouraging progressives to actually address the root causes, rather than constantly spouting progressive-sounding apologia for them. Not to tell you in another country how your politics works, but I know that in the United States and in some other countries I'm acquainted with, the progressive base in major cities are, if anything, even more attached to their housing nest-eggs than the homeowner/smallholder classes in smaller cities and more conservative states. This preference is visible in the differences of housing policy and rents between, say, California and Texas.
The Zelensky curse strikes again.
For liberals to give up power in both Canada and US so hurriedly, there must something really bad brewing that they don't want to be blamed for.
Trudeau has been unpopular for years and hideously unpopular for the past couple of months, mostly as a result of the current state of things being bad (and as they've been in power for nearly 10 years, they already cop the blame for that), not hypothetical future bad things.
No need to get conspiratorial.
It wouldn't be a conspiracy, just strategic thinking.
It wouldn't be the first time in history where one party/group/individual decides to relinquish power anticipating some crisis:
- Sulla was a dictator who retired before the collapse of the Roman republic. - The British handed over power to India before the communal violence escalated. - Nixon resigned to avoid the spectacle of impeachment.
Someone in power may be able to better see some things inevitably coming and bail out sooner to avoid the worse.
You said Trudeau was unpopular for years and yet only now he's leaving.
>You said Trudeau was unpopular for years and yet only now he's leaving.
There's unpopular and then there's unpopular.
His approval rating has dropped off a cliff over the past year. His cabinet ministers have been resigning and/or openly criticizing him / asking for him to step down to save their own political careers.
This article is from last September - 4 months ago.
>> Darrell Bricker, a political scientist and pollster with Ipsos, compared the current moment in Canadian politics to this summer’s historic defeat of the UK Tories, who lost 251 seats in British parliament.
>>“It’s basically over,” said Mr Bricker of Trudeau’s government in an interview with the BBC.
>>“All that is happening is sands sliding out of the sand dial, and we’re working our way towards an inevitable conclusion.”
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cjrdrnxp74wo
And then this article is from October:
>>Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada faced the stiffest challenge to his leadership from fellow elected Liberal Party members on Wednesday during a closed-door meeting where he was urged to resign to avoid torpedoing the party’s chances in the next election.
>>For more than a year, the Liberals under Mr. Trudeau have trailed the Conservative Party by double digits in polls, suggesting that the Liberal Party could face a crushing defeat in the next election, which must be held by next October.
>>Panic within the party intensified after the Liberals recently lost two special parliamentary elections in districts that had been considered their strongholds.
>>The growing dissatisfaction played out on Wednesday, when most of the 153 Liberal members of Parliament gathered in Ottawa for a scheduled caucus meeting.
>>While caucus proceedings are typically secret, Mr. Trudeau, according to Canadian news media citing unnamed sources, was presented with a letter signed by about two dozen caucus members calling on him to step down.
>>The letter has been circulating for several days, but has been a closely held secret.
>>About 20 Liberal members criticized Mr. Trudeau’s leadership after the letter was read aloud during the three-hour-and-17-minute meeting, according to Canadian news outlets.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/23/world/canada/trudeau-vote...
Why do you insist that having a 23% approval rating and half of your party begging you to resign isn't a good enough reason?
Seriously, if you're not familiar with the internal politics of another country, why would you make up conspiracies about them?
No need to get emotional.
We agree that there was a good reason for Trudeau to not be in power for a while.
I am just focusing on the timing and history.
The timing, if you ask most Canadians, is months late.
Months? Well, only if you mean 120 months. The guy managed to destroy the best country in the world, leaving it with no foreseeable way back. Maybe joining the US is the only option now.
I don’t know if it is about blame for the other side, but I can see Trudeau being a scapegoat for all of Canada’s problems. I DO think he is responsible for a lot of Canada’s problems in the cultural side, especially as it affects politics. But the laws and realities of governing the country are also the fault of legislators who in turn are voted in by people. So to me what I view this as, is people rejecting the current highly progressive order of things in Canada but also the left leaning side of Canada’s politics ejecting Trudeau as a way to not bring blame onto the rest of the party and its politicians.
Liberals did not "give up power" in the US. They lost power in the US. That's not the same thing.
They have messed up so much in this election that it must have been on purpose.
Hanlon's Razor seems to fit too well IMHO. Assuming malice is a hard one to swallow when the evidence of bad decision-making is everywhere to see. To be on purpose for example you would have to assume that the hordes of people inside and outside the administration and the media all conspired to cover up Biden's deteriorating state, with the knowledge (or high probability) that he would lose in the first debate and step down without giving Harris enough time (or whatever theory you believe to explain why she lost). Just that portion alone is quite hard to believe IMHO.
No, there is no need to assume "hordes of people", just the top echelon, the ones knowing the real situation.
The hordes of people you have in mind are very malleable and are easily conducted.
One example: https://www.nbcnews.com/nightly-news/video/tv-anchors-decryi...
"not a thing comes to mind!"
It's that they were the party for the COVID money pump hangover / inflation. The conservatives lost power in the UK for the same reason.
The entire market is due for major correction. I’m delighted I get to blame it on conservatives when it happens. It was probably inevitable, no matter what party is in power. That’s just how it is when you get two standard deviations away from the mean.
https://www.currentmarketvaluation.com/models/s&p500-mean-re...
You think the market is going to collapse but you're happy about it because it'll be bad for the conservatives?
You might want to rethink a few things.
[flagged]
I don’t like taxes and bureaucracy so now I’m a homophobe?!
[flagged]
What, exactly, is the mechanism by which the Tories winning the Canadian election causes your murder?
Oh, I honestly don't think the Conservatives will have you killed, unless maybe you hit on Melissa Lantsman's wife.
I was expecting this to be a Beaverton article.
It's worth keeping in mind that truck strikes have been used to disrupt infrastructure to prepare for coups.